Truth:

Alexander did not shoot the nose off of the Sphinx of Giza.

The one-meter-wide nose on the face is missing. A legend that the nose was broken off by a cannon ball fired by Alexander the Great is still in circulation yet firearms had not even been invented during Alexander’s time. A second myth is that Napoléon Bonaparte shot it off, as do diverse variants indicting British troops, Mamluks, and others. However, sketches of the Sphinx by Frederick Lewis Norden made in 1737 and published in 1755 illustrate the Sphinx without a nose. The Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, writing in the fifteenth century, attributes the vandalism to Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi fanatic from the khanqah of Sa'id al-Su'ada. In 1378, upon finding the Egyptian peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest, Sa'im al-Dahr was so outraged that he destroyed the nose. Al-Maqrizi describes the Sphinx as the “ Nile talisman” on which the locals believed the cycle of inundation depended. Head of the Giza Sphinx, its prognathous profile in silhouette. Over the centuries, numerous writers and scholars have recorded their impressions and reactions upon seeing the Great Sphinx of Giza. French scholar Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney visited Egypt between 1783 and 1785. He is one of the earliest known Western scholars to remark upon what he saw as its "typically Negro" countenance.  "...[The Copts] all have a bloated face, puffed up eyes, flat nose, thick lips; in a word, the true face of the negro. I was tempted to attribute it to the climate, but when I visited the Sphinx, its appearance gave me the key to the riddle. On seeing that head, typically negro in all its features, I remembered the remarkable passage where Herodotus says: 'As for me, I judge the Colchians to be a colony of the Egyptians because, like them, they are black with woolly hair. ...'".                           Upon visiting Egypt in 1849, French author Gustave Flaubert echoed de Volney's observations. In his travel log chronicling his trip, he wrote: We stop before a Sphinx; it fixes us with a terrifying stare. Its eyes still seem full of life; the left side is stained white by bird-droppings (the tip of the Pyramid of Khephren has the same long white stains); it exactly faces the rising sun, its head is grey, ears very large and protruding like a negro’s, its neck is eroded; from the front it is seen in its entirety thanks to great hollow dug in the sand; the fact that the nose is missing increases the flat, negroid effect. Besides, it was certainly Ethiopian; the lips are thick…. Reference links: Wikipedia.org – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_of_Giza                 This Myth has been BUSTED!