The Great Sphinx of Giza lost its nose long before Napoleon reached Egypt in 1798. The popular story that his soldiers shot it off with cannon fire is wrong by at least sixty years.

• ✓F. L. Norden, Voyage d'Égypte et de Nubie (1755)
• ✓al-Maqrizi, al-Khitat

The Great Sphinx of Giza is missing its nose. Everyone blames Napoleon's cannons. Wrong century. In 1737, a Danish sea captain sketched the Sphinx, and the nose was already gone, sixty years before Napoleon arrived. Get close to the face, and you can see how it came off. Someone hammered long rods into the nose, then pried it loose. Not cannon fire. Hand tools. A medieval historian even names a suspect. In 1378, he says, a Sufi zealot caught farmers leaving offerings to the Sphinx, praying for a good harvest, and attacked its face in a rage. When sand later buried their fields, locals called it the Sphinx's revenge. Not an army. Someone with a chisel took the nose off the Great Sphinx of Giza.