Colossi of Memnon: Twin Statues of Amenhotep III at Thebes

The Colossi of Memnon are two enormous seated statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, set up in about 1350 BC at the entrance to his mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, modern Luxor. The temple behind them has almost entirely vanished, but the statues still stand about 18 metres high. In Roman times one of them was famous for “singing” at dawn, which made it one of the great tourist attractions of the ancient world.

Background: Amenhotep III’s temple of millions of years

Amenhotep III ruled Egypt in about 1390–1353 BC, at a time of peace and great wealth. Like other New Kingdom kings, he built a “temple of millions of years” on the west bank of Thebes, where rituals would sustain his spirit after death. His tomb lay separately in the hills, in the western branch of the Valley of the Kings.

His mortuary temple, at the site now called Kom el-Hettan, was the largest of its kind, usually estimated to have covered around 35 hectares. It had a series of courts and gateways, and was filled with statues: colossi of the king, sphinxes, and hundreds of granite figures of the lioness goddess Sekhmet. The two colossi faced east toward the river and marked the main entrance.

Ancient texts credit the planning of the king’s great building works to Amenhotep son of Hapu, a royal scribe and architect later revered as a sage. A stela from the temple records that it was built of fine white sandstone, with gold and silver decoration, and floors plated with silver.

The statues

Each colossus shows Amenhotep III seated on a throne, with hands resting on his knees, wearing the royal headcloth (nemes). Each was carved from a single block of quartzite sandstone. The stone is usually said to have come from Gebel el-Ahmar near modern Cairo, several hundred kilometres downstream, although some scholars have proposed quarries closer to Thebes.

Smaller figures stand beside the king’s legs. They represent women of the royal family, chiefly his great royal wife, Queen Tiye, and his mother Mutemwia, shown far smaller than the king in keeping with Egyptian conventions of rank. The sides of the thrones carry reliefs of two Nile gods tying together the papyrus and lotus plants, a traditional symbol of the union of Upper and Lower Egypt.

The statues reach about 18 metres including their bases, and their weight is usually estimated at several hundred tonnes each, with figures around 700 tonnes often quoted. How they were transported and raised is not documented.

Destruction of the temple

The temple did not last long. Because it stood close to the river on the floodplain, Nile floods weakened its foundations. Within about 150 years, later kings, including Merenptah, were removing its blocks and statues for their own monuments.

Earthquakes completed the damage. The strongest known one, traditionally dated to 27 BC, shook the Theban region and badly cracked the northern colossus, toppling part of its upper body. Much of the remaining temple was reduced to scattered stone buried beneath silt and fields.

The singing statue

After the earthquake the cracked northern statue began to produce a sound, usually at or soon after sunrise. The Greek geographer Strabo, who visited Egypt in the 20s BC, says he heard a noise like a blow, though he could not tell whether it came from the statue or from someone nearby.

Greek visitors identified the statue with Memnon, son of the dawn goddess Eos, a king of the Ethiopians killed by Achilles at Troy. The morning sound was understood as Memnon greeting his mother. The travel writer Pausanias, in the second century AD, noted that the people of Thebes themselves said the statue showed a local man called Phamenoph, a Greek rendering of Amenhotep.

Hearing the statue became a fashionable experience for elite travellers. More than a hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions were carved on its legs and base, many recording the date and the hour the visitor heard it. In November AD 130 the emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina came; poems by Julia Balbilla, a noblewoman in their party, are still cut into the stone.

The sound is now usually explained as a natural effect: as the sun warmed the cracked, dew-soaked stone, moisture and air escaping through the fissures produced a ringing or whistling noise. According to a common account, repairs carried out around AD 199, often attributed to the emperor Septimius Severus, restored the upper body with stacked sandstone blocks, and the statue fell silent. The link to Severus is traditional rather than firmly documented.

Modern research and conservation

European travellers sketched the colossi from the eighteenth century onward, and Napoleon’s scholars recorded them in the Description de l’Égypte. For a long time the statues were thought to be all that survived of the temple.

Since 1998 the Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project, directed by Hourig Sourouzian, has excavated the site. The team has lowered groundwater, recovered foundations of columns and courts, found numerous Sekhmet statues and reassembled several fallen royal colossi from the temple’s gateways, some of which have been raised again on their original bases.

Myths and facts

Myth: The statues represent Memnon. The name is a Greek invention. Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the thrones name Amenhotep III, and even in Roman times local people knew the statues as images of a king of Egypt.

Myth: Both statues sang. Only the northern colossus, cracked by the earthquake, was said to make a sound, and only for about two centuries. The southern statue was never described as singing.

Fact: The sound was irregular. Visitors’ inscriptions show that some travellers, including members of Hadrian’s party, came on more than one morning before they heard it, while others left disappointed. This fits a natural cause linked to temperature and moisture rather than a fixed daily event.

Fact: The statues were never isolated. Today they stand alone in farmland, but in Amenhotep III’s reign they were only the first of many colossal figures lining a processional route that led west through the temple toward its innermost sanctuary.

Key people

• Amenhotep III – the pharaoh represented by the statues.
• Amenhotep son of Hapu – official credited with directing royal building projects.
• Strabo – Greek geographer who described the sound in the late first century BC.
• Hadrian – Roman emperor who visited in AD 130.
• Hourig Sourouzian – archaeologist leading modern excavation and conservation.

Timeline

• c. 1390 BC: Amenhotep III becomes king of Egypt.
• c. 1350 BC: The colossi are standing at the entrance of his mortuary temple.
• c. 1200 BC: Later kings, including Merenptah, reuse stone from the ruined temple.
• 27 BC: An earthquake cracks the northern statue, according to the traditional date.
• AD 130, November: Hadrian and Sabina visit and hear the statue.
• c. AD 199: Repairs to the northern statue; the sound reportedly stops.
• 1998: Start of the modern conservation project at Kom el-Hettan.

Why it matters

The Colossi of Memnon are rare survivors of one of Egypt’s grandest temples and a vivid record of Amenhotep III’s ambitions. Their Roman graffiti also preserve one of the earliest examples of mass tourism, showing how ancient Egypt fascinated later civilisations long before modern Egyptology began.