While the Great Sphinx has no wings, it needs to be included in the list of Guardians. It is certainly one of the largest Guardians we have found and thus deserves a place in this collection

Guardian of the Horizon    Copyright (c) 2001 - Andrew Bayuk, All Rights Reserved

The Sphinx of Giza is a symbol that has represented the essence of Egypt for thousands of years. Even with all of the pictures that we see of the Sphinx, nothing can really prepare you for the time that you finally see the Sphinx with your own eyes. Here's a look at the Sphinx that will give you a hint of what you can expect to see if you visit Egypt.

SOURCE and more pictures with story
 

HISTORY OF THE CONSERVATION OF THE SPHINX
by Dr. Zahi Hawass

This bas relief is from his sarcophagus. The Cherubim have been identified as Winged Sphinxes (p. 127. Sabatino Moscati. The Phoenicians. Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri Bompiani, Sonzono, Etas S.p.A. Milan. March 1988). Moscati dates the sarcophagus to the 13th-12th century B.C. that is about 300 years before King Solomon.

Today Cherubim have been stylized to be cute chubby babies, completely taking away what they looked like in the past.

Dur-Sharrukin

Dur-Sharrukin ("Fortress of Sargon"), present day Khorsabad, was the Assyrian capital in the time of Sargon II of Assyria. Khorsabad is a village in northern Iraq, 15 km northeast of Mosul, which is still today inhabited by Assyrians. The great city was entirely built in the decade preceding 706 BC. After the unexpected death of Sargon, the capital was shifted 20 km south to Nineveh.

SOURCE: Wikipedia Dur-Sharrukin

Adam McLean notes that Lilith appears in Judaism as "the promoter of erotic dreams and nightmares, and the destroyer of little children" (McClean, 97). This is a useful precis of her function, but might be usefully expanded upon. Adam's first helpmeet, Lilith was formed from filth and sediment rather than the dust that formed Adam. After an uneasy marriage, Lilith rebelled and left Adam, which moved him to complain to God. When found and threatened with death for her disloyalty, Lilith haughtily replied, "'How can I die, when God has ordered me to take charge of all newborn children: boys up to the eighth day of life, that of circumcision; girls up to the twentieth day?" God punished Lilith by "making one hundred of her demon children perish daily."
(*Alpha Beta Diben Sira, 47; **Gaster, MGWJ, 29 (1880), 553 ff.)

Lilith's animosity toward children is picked up elsewhere. Hieronymus, a fourth century Greek commentator, identified Lilith with Lamia, a Libyan queen deserted by Zeus, and then robbed of her children by Hera. In blind revenge, Lamia robbed other women of their children. Graves and Patai report that in Jewish communities a circle was drawn with natron or charcoal on the wall of a birthroom to protect a newborn child, particularly if he was a male. The words "Adam and Eve. Out, Lililth!' were written within the circle. If the sleeping child happened to laugh in his sleep, it was thought that Lilith had somehow succeeded in approaching the child, and was fondling him. The wary guardian or parent could banish Lilith and avoid catastrophe by striking thee sleeping child on the lips with one finger.

Writing in The Hebrew Myths, Robert Graves and Raphael Patai note that 'Lilith' is usually derived from the Babylonian-Asyrian word lilitu, but appears earlier in Sumerian mythology as 'Lillake,' on a 2000 B.C. tablet from Ur containing the tale of  Gilgamesh and The Willow Tree, which identifies her as a fertility goddess. Graves and Patai also usefully suggest that popular Hebrew etymology derived 'Lilith' from layil, night. The authors interpret the midrashic accounts of her sexual promiscuity to mean that Lilith had been a fertility goddess.

    * (Graves, Hebrew Myths, 12, 65-69)

Related Links:

• The Separation of Heaven and Earth
• The Earliest Figurational Ancestors of Mother Goose

Hittites

The Hittites were an ancient Anatolian people who spoke a language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family and established a kingdom centered at Hattusa (Hittite URUḪattuša) in north-central Anatolia (on the Central Anatolian plateau) ca. the 18th century BC. The Hittite empire reached its height ca. the 14th century BC, encompassing a large part of Anatolia, north-western Syria about as far south as the mouth of the Litani River (a territory known as Amqu), and eastward into upper Mesopotamia. After ca. 1180 BC, the empire disintegrated into several independent "Neo-Hittite" city-states, some surviving until as late as the 8th century BC.

SOURCE: Wikipedia Hittites

The Separation of Heaven and Earth

Erich Neumann interprets the airborne Aphrodite as a symbol of humanity's maturing ability to control its creatural side and to recognize a deeper, spiritual nature. He finds evidence for this liminal moment in the shift from configuring the "Lady of the Beasts" as an animal to configuring her as riding or standing beside it. He writes, "Later . . . she ceases to 'be' the goose itself, but rides on it or wears its symbol on her cloak. . . . At this higher stage, she becomes a goddess in human form, ruling over the animal kingdom." To her task of presiding over animals, Neumann adds that "The Lady of the Beasts" had the care of the male, whom she domesticates, thus founding ". . . the first human culture." Finally, as "Lady of the Beasts," the Goddess symbolizes the continum that stretches between the instinctual world of the unconscious and the highest forms of psychic reality. (Neumann, 276-280)

The Earliest Figurational Ancestors of Mother Goose