Read the passage below and summarize it using one sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task.
Your response will be judge on the quality of your writing and on how well your response presents the key points in the passage.
The face, though better preserved than most of the statue, has been
battered by centuries of weathering and vandalism. In 1402, an Arab historian reported that a Sufi
zealot had disfigured it “to remedy some religious errors.” Yet there are clues
to what the face looked like in its prime. Archaeological excavations in the
early 19th century found pieces of its carved stone beard and a royal cobra
emblem from its headdress. Residues of red pigment are still visible on the
face, leading researchers to conclude that at some point, the Sphinx’s entire
visage was painted red. Traces of blue and yellow paint elsewhere suggest to
Lehner that the Sphinx was once decked out in gaudy comic book colors.
For thousands of years, sand buried the colossus up to its shoulders, creating
a vast disembodied head atop the eastern edge of the Sahara. Then, in 1817, a Genoese
adventurer, Capt. Giovanni Battista Caviglia, led 160 men in the first modern
attempt to dig out the Sphinx. They could not hold back the sand, which poured
into their excavation pits nearly as fast as they could dig it out. The
Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan finally freed the statue from the sand in
the late 1930s. “The Sphinx has thus emerged into the landscape out of shadows
of what seemed to be an impenetrable oblivion,” the New York Times declared.
