Colossi of Memnon — sculpture
MusikAnimal · CC BY-SA 4.0

Colossi of Memnon

  • Elevation79 m
  • 1 min read
  • 25.721° N 32.611° E

Interesting facts

  • The quartzite was quarried at Gebel el-Ahmar near modern Cairo and transported about 675 km south to Thebes.
  • Each pharaoh figure is about 14 metres high on its own; stone platforms around 4 metres tall raise them to about 18 metres.
  • Small figures of Amenhotep's wife Tiye and his mother Mutemwiya stand beside his legs; a third, probably a daughter, is lost.
  • The sides of the thrones are carved with reliefs of Hapi, the god of the Nile flood.
  • Exactly 107 ancient inscriptions survive on the statues: 61 in Greek, 45 in Latin and one bilingual, dated between about AD 20 and 250.
  • Emperor Hadrian and his wife Vibia Sabina visited in November AD 130, and the court poet Julia Balbilla carved verses about the visit into the stone.
  • The vanished temple behind the colossi covered about 35 hectares, the largest mortuary temple in Egypt in its time.
  • An earthquake around 1200 BC wrecked the temple, whose mud-brick parts were then worn away by centuries of Nile floods.
  • The upper part of the northern colossus was rebuilt in Roman times with tiers of sandstone blocks, possibly brought from Edfu.
  • The two statues sit about 15 metres apart, both facing east towards the Nile.

Why it is worth it

These two seated figures — about 18 metres tall, roughly 720 tons of quartzite sandstone apiece — are nearly all that remains standing of what was once Egypt's largest mortuary temple, built for Amenhotep III around 1350 BC. The temple itself behind them was dismantled and its stone reused for other buildings in antiquity; the colossi survived purely because they were too massive to be worth moving.

An earthquake in 27 BC cracked the northern statue across the waist, and not long afterward it started making a sound each morning around sunrise — most likely dew evaporating through the newly fractured stone as the day warmed. Greek and Roman visitors, who had already nicknamed the pharaoh "Memnon" after a mythical Ethiopian king from the Trojan War cycle, turned the sound into an oracle and traveled specifically to hear it: the geographer Strabo, who heard it himself in 20 BC, described it as like a blow; Pausanias compared it to a snapping lyre string.

The singing lasted roughly two centuries, ending only when the emperor Septimius Severus had the cracks packed with sandstone blocks around 199 AD to shore up the statue — silencing it for good in the process. What those ancient tourists left behind is still there: more than a hundred inscriptions carved into the statues' legs and bases by visitors recording that they had heard it, making this arguably one of the earliest tourist attractions anyone ever traveled specifically to experience.

Getting there

3 km from Aţ Ţārif. Luxor International Airport (LXR) is about 11 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Luxor 6The Most Beautiful Places in Egypt 35The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in Egypt 13The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Egypt 15The Most Beautiful Sculptures 50The Most Remarkable Monuments 56The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites 193The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306

From the encyclopaedia

The Colossi of Memnon are two large stone statues of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III, which stand at the front of the ruined Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III, the largest temple in the Theban Necropolis. They have stood since 1350 BC, and were well known to ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as early modern travelers and Egyptologists. The statues contain 107 Roman-era inscriptions in Greek and Latin, dated to between AD 20 and 250; many of these inscriptions on the northernmost statue make reference to the Greek mythological king Memnon, whom the statue was then erroneously thought to represent.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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