Thanks very much to Thierry Benderitter from the excellent OsirisNet for sending me these great photographs. The sphinxes are located in the peristyle of the Roman Emperor Diocletian's palace in Split, on Croatia's Adriatic coast. Diocletian abdicated in AD305, and this palace was built for him to spend the rest of his life in. The palace was built using a number of different types of stone - mainly local white limestone, marble and other local materials, but also imported Egyptian granite for the columns, and the sphinxes were brought ready made from Egypt.
Photos of Diocletian's Palace appear on a dedicated gallery page World Heritage section of the UNESCO website. It looks like a fascinating place. There's also a terrific artist's reconstruction of the palace on Wikipedia - it was a vast complex! If you are interested in reading more about the palace, there's a comprehensive survey of it by Michael Greenhalgh from the Department of Art History, the Australian National Univeristy, entitled The "palace" of Diocletian at Split: A Unique Structure from the Later Roman Empire.
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