 This name may be derived from the fact that, in a pride of lions, the hunters are the lionesses, and kill their prey by strangulation, biting the throat of prey and holding them down until they die.However, the historian Susan Wise Bauer suggests that the word "sphinx" was instead a Greek corruption of the Egyptian name "shesepankh", which meant "living image", and referred rather to the "statue" of the sphinx, which was carved out of "living rock" (rock that was present at the construction site, not harvested and brought from another location), than to the beast itself.Apollodorus describes the sphinx as having a woman's face, the body and tail of a lion and the wings of a bird.