Why doesn the Sphinx have a nose?
The Egyptian Arab historian al-Maqrīzī, writing in the fifteenth century CE, attributes the loss to iconoclasm by Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim fanatic from the khanqah of Sa’id al-Su’ada. In 1378 CE, upon finding the Egyptian peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest, Sa’im al-Dahr was so outraged that he destroyed the nose, and was hanged for vandalism.
