Napoleon’s troops never shot the nose off the Great Sphinx; Arab historians documented the missing nose centuries before he was born. That myth is the starting point for this deep dive, which tells the life story of the world’s oldest known monumental sculpture, from its geological birth as compressed sea life in an Eocene ocean to the Old Kingdom laborers who carved it from living bedrock with copper chisels and then abandoned the temple in front of it.

We follow its burial by sand, Thutmose IV’s politically convenient dream and the Dream Stele, its Roman-era life as a tourist attraction with a viewing staircase and a bright red painted face, the 1378 iconoclast who chiseled off the nose, the 19th-century explorers who drilled and dynamited its back, and the fringe theories, from Edgar Cayce’s Atlantis to the water-erosion hypothesis, that rush to fill its silences.

• The Mokattam Formation: why layers of hard and soft limestone explain both the carving and the weathering
• Khafre, Khufu, or Djedefre? The paternity dispute over whose face is on the monument
• Gaudy comic-book colors and a braided stone beard now in the British Museum
• Perring’s Hole, the Rump Passage, and a pair of old shoes at the bottom of a treasure hunter’s tunnel
• Why mainstream geology and archaeology reject a 10,000-year-old Sphinx