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Oedipus: Egyptian Sphinx
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No sooner had he disposed of these bad people, Oedipus came face to face with the Sphinx, sitting on her rock at the crossroad. This creature, a winged lion with the head of a woman, had taken up residence outside of the city of Thebes and was terrorizing the populace.
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As Velikovsky dug into the Oedipus and Akhnaton background materials he found several problems that mitigated against a Thebes Greece origin for Oedipus and pointed rather in the direction of Thebes Egypt. The first of these was the female sphinx, "a winged maiden monster," who did a cameo appearance in the Greek tragedy. Sphinxes were not box office items in Greece but they were Standing Room Only in Egypt. Secondly, no convincing tombs or burial places for the participants in the supposedly Greek tragedy have been found.
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This is what Oedipus saves the people of Thebes from when he kills the sphinx, certainly a threat in the mythic sense. Oedipus crows about his ability to save Thebes. He proves Protagoras' maxim that "man is the measure of all things." Indeed, "Man" is the answer to the Sphinx's riddle! But not just any man - Oedipus solves the riddle, Oedipus ends the sphinx's reign of terror over the people of Thebes, Oedipus brings a new era of harmony to the city of Thebes by besting this mythic and metaphorical threat to human culture and society.
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"The gods" made the prophecies that led Oedipus into disaster. The sphinx appeared (she must have been sent by the gods), and Oedipus solved her riddle (the chorus says he must have been guided by the gods.) Teiresias could not solve the riddle, or detect the killer -- thanks to "the gods". At the beginning, Apollo's oracle simply says, "Find the killer" -- leading to the cruel ironies of the play. Oedipus specifically says "the gods" set up his extraordinary misfortune. And at the end, Apollo merely gives Oedipus the strength to carve his own eyes out of their sockets.
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The poet Cinaethon of Sparta wrote an epic called the The Story of Oedipus (... called Oedipodea). Though it did not survive, a few scattered commentaries on the epic did. The story seems to tell of a merged Oedipus and Sphinx story, but details are unclear.
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Egyptian Sphinx