Huge Sphinx Makes Crawling Journey to New Spot in Museum

Workers move a 25,000-pound Sphinx of Ramses II at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Wednesday, June 12, 2019. The 3,000-year-old sphinx is being relocated from the Egypt Gallery where it's resided since 1926 to a featured location in the museum's new entrance hall. Photo: Matt Rourke / AP
Workers move a 25,000-pound Sphinx of Ramses II at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Wednesday, June 12, 2019. The 3,000-year-old sphinx is being relocated from the Egypt Gallery where it's resided since 1926 to a featured location in the museum's new entrance hall. Photo: Matt Rourke / AP

PHILADELPHIA — The largest ancient sphinx in the Western Hemisphere was on the prowl Wednesday for the first time in nearly 100 years.

Philadelphia’s Penn Museum relocated its 3,000-year-old sphinx of Pharaoh Ramses II from the Egypt gallery, where it had resided since 1926, to a featured location in the museum’s new entrance hall.

Workers used air dollies to painstakingly maneuver the priceless artifact up a specially constructed ramp and through a series of doorways, windows, sharp turns and tight squeezes, a distance of about 250 feet (76 meters).

The sphinx was as inscrutable as ever throughout. Museum officials, on the other hand, were a little more animated.

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“It’s been extremely exciting and nerve-wracking, too. I’ll sleep a lot better tonight,” said director Julian Siggers, adding the sphinx was insured for an “eye-wateringly high figure.”

The monument, which was carved out of a single block of red granite and has the head of a man and the body of a lion, was unearthed in 1913 by famed British archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, whose excavations the museum funded. It was relocated as part of the museum’s extensive, multi-year makeover.

“We needed something very powerful right when you walked into this renovated space, and that is when we said, ‘What a shame we can’t have the sphinx here. It would be perfect,’ Siggers said. “The received wisdom was it was impossible to move.”

The museum’s unofficial mascot underwent 3-D imaging to determine its weight (25,000 pounds, 11,340 kilograms) and density so that engineers could determine what would be required to move it.

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As predicted, Wednesday’s journey took several hours. It’ll be lifted onto its new base Thursday.

“This move was so carefully orchestrated,” said associate curator Jennifer Houser Wegner, who co-wrote a book on the sphinx. “I felt very confident, knock wood, that things would go according to plan.”

Story: Michael Rubinkam