Sphinx, part of an Incense Burner

This small sphinx with curling locks, facing right, was originally part of a sculptured openwork incense burner produced somewhere in Northern Syria or on the Levantine coast in the Iron Age. It may have been reworked as a separate object after the incense burner itself had been broken up. The sphinx of the female type seems to have originated in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Anatolian worlds as a guardian figure which made its way to the Near East where it is abundant in many media during the Iron Age. Around 700 BCE the female sphinx returned to the Greek world where it had a long and illustrious career as a fearsome guardian of tombs and as the sphinx whose deadly riddle was solved by Oedipus. (David Gordon Mitten, 2004)