It is said that one of the artillery bullets fired from French cannons hit the face of the statue, redeeming the nose. However, this hypothesis has been debunked, as many sketches from the French Emperor’s period depicted the Sphinx as it looks today. For the disfigurement of the Sphinx’s face, 15th-century Egyptian historian Al-Maqrizi blames a Sufi Muslim, Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr, who, seeing that the local population was offering their crops as gifts to the Sphinx, decided to damage the statue in order to curb pagan customs. The local population linked the damage to the statue to the sandstorms haunting the Giza plateau. Al-Dahr himself was killed shortly after the incident.
