and said by the priests to have belonged to the sun-god, had doubtless come down from the days of fetishism. It has often been asserted that besides the bull or the ram or the crocodile, there were other creatures of a composite or fabulous character which were also accounted sacred by the Egyptians. It is true that the sacred animal and symbol of Set seems to be of this nature. His forked tail and ass-like ears make it difficult to believe that any existing beast ever served for his portrait. But the sphinx, in whom the men of the Eighteenth Dynasty saw the image of Harmakhis, the rising sun, or the phœnix in whom the sun-god of Heliopolis was incarnated, belongs to a different category. They are not sacred animals in the sense in which Apis and Mnevis were so. The sphinx, like the symbol of Set, is one of those composite creatures which meet us from time to time in Egyptian art. It has been said that such composite creatures were as real to the Egyptian as the cattle and sheep he tended in the fields; that he was quite as much prepared to meet with them in the desert, as the ancient Greek would have been to meet with a satyr in the woods or a Highlander with a kelpie by the waterside. Very possibly that was the case; it will not, however, explain their origin, or the forms that were assigned to them. Why, for instance, should the sphinx of Giza be in the form of a lion with a human head? Once more we must look to Asia for an explanation. The sphinx of Giza was the guardian of the tombs of the dead; it protected them from the spiritual foes whose home was in the desert. “I protect thy sepulchral chapel,” it is made to say in an inscription, “I watch over thy sepulchral chamber, I keep away the stranger who would enter, I overthrow the foe with their weapons, I drive the wicked from thy tomb, I annihilate thy opponents ... so that they return no more.”(79) The sphinx, in fact, performed precisely the same office as the winged bulls that guarded the entrance to an Assyrian palace, or the cherubim who stood at the gates of the garden of Eden.