The Colossi of Memnon - They Sang at Dawn - Eos who wept for the death of her son Agamemnon

The Colossi of Memnon

                                                                          

                                               
The Colossi of Memnon are two enormous statues sitting on the throne of two lands rising to a height 66ft, they originally flanked the entrance to the Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep 111, and the remains of the temple are in the process of being excavated. Amenhotep 111 also created the large Hall of Festivals at Luxor Temple, and his tomb was found in the Valley of the Kings by soldiers of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1799. 

His wife Queen Tiye was not of royal blood, unusually she was the daughter of a chariot officer; both his wife and his mother Mut-em-ua embrace the sides of his legs. These two statues sitting alone on the fields became famous during the Greek conquest of Egypt when the right statue was known to sing. The Colossi face East and the River Nile, with a backdrop of the Theban Mountains and the Tombs of the Nobles. 

The Colossi represent Amenophis 111 of the 18th dynasty, who was the father of the heretic king Akhenaten. The left statue is in a better condition than the right one, the decoration on the base of the throne shows Hapi the God of The Nile, he is an unusual God because although male he is represented with female breasts, and a flabby belly of a woman who has seen child birth, his presence on the colossi would be to guarantee the fertility of the cultivated fields when the Nile floods. The Greeks named the right statue after the legend of Memnon who was the son of the Titan Goddess Eos. Memnon had been slain by Achilles during the Trojan War and the Greeks believed the sound that came from the statue in the morning was Memnon greeting his mother Eos who wept for the death of her son.  Graffiti carved on the foot of the Memnon translated reads ‘From Trebulla. Hearing the Holy voice of Memnon I missed you, O my mother, and I prayed that you might hear him too.’



 Over the ages science has taken away belief and scholars explain that the Colossi was cracked during an earthquake and the singing is now known not to be the singing of gods but  the cause of  the rock having cooled during the night, and once the rock heated up again at sunrise it caused the sounds to emit from the cracks. From a distance the colossi look unimpressive due to their deterioration, and  most travelers get off their bus and stand at the edge of the car park  to take their photos, then they all swarm back onto their buses again unaware of the interest that the Memnon can inspire, do not be discouraged  by the appearance and layers of wreckage of the colossi because if you walk over and stand beneath the mighty statues of Amenophis, on closer  inspection the right colossi   has the most interesting graffiti that has been etched into the stone of it’s legs from the many travelers throughout  the centuries to commemorate that they heard the sound or paid homage to the Memnon, words are written in  Latin  Greek English and  the French  soldiers  during Napoleon’s  attempted conquest  of Egypt, some of the etched comments  written ;  Camilius, hora prima semis' audivi Memnoni. Which means, ‘At half-past the first hour I Camilius, have heard the Memnon’ It is believed that Camilius was an early second - century Roman governor of the province of Egypt.

I would love to climb a ladder armed with large sheets of tracing paper and gently rub the inscriptions out onto the paper to be able to decipher all the comments from the travelers that have come to the Memnon over the centuries creating a book on the graffiti of the Memnon, it is one of the largest and most unusual autograph books written in stone that I have ever seen.

The Roman Emperor Hadrian visited the Memnon with his wife the Empress Sabrina and his court, in their company was a poet and companion of the empress Julia Balbilla, she had her own graffiti carved onto the foot of the Memnon which translated  reads: ‘I Balbilla, when the rock spoke, heard the voice of the Divine Memnon or Phamenoth. I came here with the lovely Empress Sabina. The Course of the Sun was in its first hour, in the fifteenth year of Hadrian’s reign on the 24th day of the month of Hathor, I wrote this on the 25th day of the month of Hathor,

The colossal statues of Amenhotep 111 were originally hewn out of the quarries at Aswan, and eight ships were built to transport them up the Nile to stand at the entrance of the mortuary temple on the West Bank of Thebes.  Only the foundations remain of the temple of Amenhotep now, earthquakes and the Nile floods left it in ruins, and later pharaohs stripped it down for their own temples, only the Colossi indicate its former entrance. Behind the colossi archaeologists are working in the foundations of the mortuary temple I noticed that they have erected the huge Stella that recorded the temple and how it was made for Amun. The archaeologists have found many statues and artifacts over the last 15 years and they are wonderful to see.