Editing Sphinx (section)

===== The riddle in popular culture =====
In [[Jean Cocteau]]'s retelling of the Oedipus legend, ''[[The Infernal Machine (play)|The Infernal Machine]]'', the Sphinx tells Oedipus the answer to the riddle in order to kill herself so that she did not have to kill any more, and also to make him love her. He leaves without ever thanking her for giving him the answer to the riddle. The scene ends when the Sphinx and [[Anubis]] ascend back to the heavens.

There are mythic, anthropological, psychoanalytic and parodic interpretations of the Riddle of the Sphinx, and of Oedipus's answer to it. [[Sigmund Freud]] describes "the question of where babies come from" as a riddle of the Sphinx.<ref>'An Autobiographical Study', Sigmund Freud, W. W. Norton & Company, 1963, [https://books.google.com/books?id=xkU5eiigOZoC&dq=freud%20Autobiographical%20Study&pg=PA39 p.39]</ref>

Numerous riddle books use the Sphinx in their title or illustrations.<ref>Regier, ''Book of the Sphinx'', chapter 4.</ref><gallery>
File:Marble stele (grave marker) of a youth and a little girl 530 BCE Greece.jpg|Funerary stele, 530 BC, [[Greece]]
File:Limestone funerary stele (shaft) surmounted by two sphinxes Greece 530 BCE.jpg|[[Cesnola Sphinx Funerary Stele|Limestone funerary stele (shaft) surmounted by two sphinxes]]. Greece, 5th century BC.
File:Marble capital and finial in the form of a sphinx.jpg|Marble capital and finial in the form of a sphinx, 530 BC
File:Carved tomb in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum - panoramio.jpg|Sphinxes on the [[Lycian sarcophagus of Sidon]] (430–420 BC)
File:Naxos Sphinx with humans for size.jpg|The [[Sphinx of Naxos]], on its 12.5-meter [[Ionic column]], [[Delphi]], 560 BC (reconstitution)
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