The Great Sphinx of Tanis is a granite sculpture of a sphinx, whose date may be as early as the 26th century BC. It was discovered in the ruins of the Temple of Amun-Ra in Tanis, Egypt's capital during the 21st Dynasty and the 23rd Dynasty. It was created much earlier, but when exactly remains debated with hypotheses of the 4th Dynasty or the 12th Dynasty.^[1] All that is left of its original inscription are the parts alluding to pharaohs Amenemhat II (12th Dynasty), Merneptah (19th Dynasty) and Shoshenq I (22nd Dynasty).

The Louvre acquired it in 1826 as part of the second Egyptian collection of Henry Salt, whose purchase was led on behalf of the French state by Jean-François Champollion. Initially, plans were made to place it outdoors, at the center of the Cour Carrée,^[2] but they were not implemented. Instead, the sphinx was exhibited in the museum's courtyard, since then known as the cour du Sphinx, from 1828 until 1848,^[3] when it was relocated to the galerie Henri IV, still now the main monumental sculpture room of the museum's Egyptian Department. In the mid-1930s, the Sphinx was transferred to its present location in the crypt created by Louvre architect Albert Ferran to connect the two halves of the southern wing of the Cour Carrée.

• Sphinx of Memphis