https://www.smithsonianjourneys.org/blogs/blog/2020/05/20/photo-what-happened-to-the-sphinxs-nose and https://news.artnet.com/art-world/the-hunt-great-sphinx-nose-2458981
Historians and archeaologists are uncertain what happened to the nose but physical evidence seems to suggest it was removed deliberately with a chisel. Still, here are the two most popular theories:
Napoleon One popular story was that one of Napoleon’s soldiers fired a cannonball that hit the nose and caused it to fall off. However, Dane Frederic Louis Norden sketched the Spynxh without a nose before Napoleon’s arrival and has thus been sufficiently debunked.
al-Maqrizi In the 15th century Egyptian-Arab historian (as described in the article) al-Maqrizi wrote the nose was destroyed by the Sufi Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr. Apparently, villagers were worhshipping the Sphynx for better harvests. Muhammad, outraged by this show of devotion, destroyed the nose and was later executed for vandalism. Apparently, “removing an idol’s nose was an accepted method to suffocate spirits inside,” explaining why many Egyptian statues are left unable to play nose goes. But its not definitively known if this is true.
