Workers building a road between Egypt's ancient temple complexes Karnak and Luxor unearthed enough of a large statue to determine that it was indeed a sphinx, the mythical creature with a human head and lion's body.

The statue is very old, and most of it is still in the ground. It will take excavators some time to extract it, said Mohamed Abel Azia, Egypt's Director General of Antiquities.

The upgrade of the famed Al-Kabbash Road, between the two ancient temple complexes, began in 2005 and is scheduled to finish at the end of 2018. An ancient road connecting the two complexes was thought to have been lined with more than a thousand sphinx-like statues, some with the head of a ram. Many of those have been discovered and now line the road in the form of the Avenue of the Sphinxes, which echoes ancient times.

The recently found human-lion sphinx statue is not as large as the well-known one at Giza. That one stands 66 feet tall.