Thank you so much for reading the article and taking the time to post!

At the time I was in Egypt (Spring 1997) it was not too difficult to get fairly close to the Great Sphinx. I was not able to get into the Sphinx enclosure because they were doing repair and restoration work, and it is important to protect heritage monuments from souvenir hunters! Just look at Khufu’s sarcophagus, where people have knocked off their own chips from the breakage originally wrought by ancient tomb robbers. Photography from the 1800’s compared to its condition today shows that people have been gradually wearing it down so they can bask in the private glory of knowing they helped destroy an ancient artifact for personal reasons.

But I don’t mean to get off on a tangent!

When I was there we were able to view the Sphinx from the Royal Causeway to Khafre’s Pyramid, which when you are talking about something as large as the Great Sphinx, is pretty close indeed. The other sphinx shots I took were from the open air museums at Mit Rahina, and the Temples of Luxor and Karnak.

–K

Content management is always a challenge. The way I have been dealing with it is to just post reference articles like this the same as news, and rely on the category system in the sidebar.

So far it is working pretty well. I get fairly regular hits daily on articles such as Khufu’s Pyramid, the Step Pyramid, and of course, the series on Jean-Pierre’s work on Khufu. And there will be more reference material to come. The next big project will be Abydos. I plan on expanding what I did with Heritage Key, but over the course of several articles, and in more detail than I could really get into with those, which were really focused on the ARCE symposium. (What I wouldn’t give to have been at that!)

WordPress is pretty good for content management, and I am not using the software anywhere near its capabilities. I will probably begin porting the reference articles into static pages at some point, but for now I like being able to premier them on the front page.

Always a work in progress, as you very well know!