The Great Sphinx of Giza was probably constructed around 2600BC. It was buried up to the neck in sand, reclaimed by the desert, and mostly forgotten, so there aren't a lot of sources saying what the Egyptians thought of it or even what they called it during the Old Kingdom. We know that the Egyptian version was male and, unlike the Greek version, was benevolent. It had great strength and cunning, and therefore guarded the entrances to temples. We also know that some of the sphinx statues that remain have the faces of Pharaohs.
In the 15th-16th century BC, the image of the sphinx was brought to Greece and Asia, where it was appropriated to the point where the appropriated version is the one we're most familiar with. The word "sphinx" is Greek, and it's unknown how the Egyptians referred to the creature during the Old Kingdom. This was where the part about the sphinx eating you if you didn't answer a riddle came in.
During the New Kingdom era, the Egyptian Prince Thutmose fell asleep under the mostly-buried great sphinx's head while he was out on a hunting trip. There, he had a dream where the god Horus told him that the sphinx needed to be restored, and that would make him a great Pharaoh. He renamed it Harmakhet or “Horus on the Horizon." When he became Pharaoh Thutmose IV (1401 BC), he restored the statue and introduced the cult of the Sphinx to his people. He also built the Dream Stele, which is a monument between the Great Sphinx's front paws, that explains this story. But then, some historians think the whole thing about the dream was a cover up for how he murdered his older brother to usurp power, and he was trying to justify his right to rule with a dream.
The desert eventually took the Great Sphinx again, burying it up to its shoulders until a Genoese adventurer named Capt. Giovanni Battista Caviglia, tried to dig it out and ultimately gave up. After that, several more people tried, until eventually Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan managed it in 1930.
It's interesting to me that in Greek stories, they usually point out that the Sphinx came from somewhere else, usually Ethiopia. So at least they're sort of honest about it? In the Greek tradition, there was only one sphinx. She had the face of a woman, body of a lion, wings like an eagle, and a tail with a snake head on the end. The sphinx stood at the entrance to Thebes, and would only let people in if they answered her riddle. "Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?" Which I know better as "What has four legs in the morning, two in the day, and three in the evening?" It's a person, because as a baby they crawl, then they walk upright, and in later years need a cane.
After quite a while of no one getting in or out of Thebes, Oedipus shows up and correctly answers the Sphinx's riddle. In response, the sphinx either threw herself off a cliff or devoured herself. Thebes was so grateful to Oedipus that they crowned him king, as the old king had recently been killed on the road by some hoodlum. (It was Oedipus.) Thebes also had Oedipus marry the queen, who some-odd yeas ago, left her baby out in the wilderness when it was prophesied that the baby would kill his father and marry his mother. (Yikes.) So you can see how the sphinx part of this story tends to take a back seat.
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