A Scottish Sphinx

It is commonly known that most significant inventions, discoveries and art originated in Scotland, it is less commonly known that this also includes the Sphinx.

Archealogical digs have suggested that around 2800BC after an evening of drinking perhaps too much "Fraoch", a type of beer made from heather (yep, we invented that too), a group of Scotsmen on their way home came across a broken statue of a lion with it's head missing. The drunken Scotsmen found a nearby boulder that resembled a human head, placed it on the broken lion statue and scratched a face on it, and thus the first Sphinx was created. A similar practise is still conducted by Scottish students (especially Glaswegian) to this day, but usually involves a traffic cone. It is believed the idea was exported to Egypt some time later by a group of Egyptians returning home from a holiday in Peru after taking a wrong turn. The original Sphinx has long since been lost but the above Sphinx was built in 1859 to commemorate the original.

N.B. Some of the above historical details may not be entirely "accurate".

The above picture is actually on the roof corner of the Royal Scottish Academy, found on "The Mound" in the centre of Edinburgh which was designed by William Henry Playfair whose work in the Greek Revival form of classical architecture was instrumental in earning Edinburgh the epithet "The Athens of the North". The Academy was opened to the public in 1859, two years after Playfair's death.

Fraoch beer IS believed to have existed in Scotland as earlier as 2000BC, however records show that a form of fermented ale existed in Egypt as early as 5000BC.