Ear stelae for Horemakhet found in and around the Great Sphinx of Giza

October 12, 2026EgyptArtifactShare

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Key facts

• Ear stelae (ear tablets) were left in temples and holy sites as a written prayer to a god's ear, so the deity would 'hear' the petition; they were widely deposited at pilgrimage destinations such as the Great Sphinx of Giza.
• Egyptologist Selim Hassan excavated numerous examples in the 1930s in and around the New Kingdom Sphinx Temple of Amenhotep II and on the Sphinx monument itself.
• Nearly all ear stelae carry the formula 'made by' followed by a name, which the video assumes identifies the person who uttered the prayer rather than the maker of the tablet.
• Egyptologist Wilhelm Spiegelberg proposed that multi-ear tablets relate to an obscure god said to have 77 ears and 77 eyes; the video notes a possible parallel in a text about the god Kenum at Esna describing him as 'conceived yesterday and born today, who has 77 eyes and 77 ears'.
• Proposed (unproven) functions for multi-ear tablets include one petition per ear, a backup copy in case some ears were damaged, and use by a whole family or community each speaking a prayer into an ear.
• From the 18th Dynasty onwards the Sphinx enclosure, known as Horemakhet ('Horus in the horizon'), was important to royalty and common people alike; royal visits were frequent.
• The video credits Thutmose IV with renovating the monument, Amenhotep II with a new Sphinx temple and Thutmose III with a royal rest house beside it.
• Ramesses II erected two stelae between the paws; a Dream Stele also stood in the area, and an inner sanctuary with an altar was later constructed.
• Every king from the 18th Dynasty onward was portrayed in sphinx form in statues and art, including Akhenaten.
• One tablet shows two low-relief ears with Horemakhet as a hawk between them, inscribed 'made by Huy'; it was found in a debris pile north of the temple of Amenhotep II.
• A single high-relief giant-ear tablet inscribed 'made by Mayor', with a small god figure on a pedestal, may be the largest ear stela known from Egypt.
• Mayor was overseer of works for Ramesses the Great and quarried the Khafre pyramid, its enclosure and mortuary temple to supply stone for the sun temple of Heliopolis; cliff inscriptions north and west of the Second Pyramid name him as 'director of the works of the house of Ra, Mayor'.
• Mayor also dedicated a fragmentary stela to the Sphinx and an ear tablet; the video argues he may have been seeking forgiveness for the quarrying and asking Horemakhet/Ra-Horakhty to look upon the Heliopolis temple built in his name.
• Other examples include a broken tablet with a large ear and two beak-to-beak hawks wearing the double crown, which Selim Hassan suggested may be divine hawks repeating prayers or the twin souls of Osiris and Ra, and a 31-ear tablet inscribed 'made by the clever scribe Myrr' found north of the Sphinx.

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