The Colossi's Little Brother
For several thousand years two huge statues have stood like silent sentinels overlooking the plain at Luxor. Until the Aswan Dam was built, that plain was regularly flooded and the statues would stand aloof above the waters which washed around their bases, islands of stone in a sea of muddy, moving water.
The Greeks, who had no idea of who or what they were, christened them "The Colossi of Memnon", after a character in the Illiad who fought with the Trojans against the Greeks. The reason was probably because the name means "Dawn Ruler" and one of the two statues was famous for "singing" at dawn. As the sun rose over the horizon, the statue would emit a sound variously described as "a blow", "a groan", "a lyre-string breaking" or "a whistle" and according to legend this was Memnon greeting his father the sun.
Needless to say, the usual claims that to hear the sound brought good luck were peddled to Greek and Roman tourists with the result that when Septimius Severus came and did not hear the sound, he was so chagrined that he determined to curry favour with the gods by repairing the statue. In so doing he altered something (no one is sure what, just as no one is sure why or how the sound was produced in the first place) and the Colossi have never spoken since.
After the Arab conquest of Egypt the name was forgotten but the legend of the singing statue remained and the Colossi are known in Arabic as es-Salamat, "the Greeters". What everyone - including the native Egyptians - had forgotten was that the two statues were merely part of the largest temple ever built.
Some have suggested that Amenhotep III, pharaoh of Egypt during the Glorious Eighteenth Dynasty, is the richest man who ever lived. Of course, it is hard at this remove to estimate his wealth or to meaningfully compare it to modern currencies, but there can be no doubt that during his reign Egypt attained a level of power and prosperity that it was never to reach again. As absolute ruler, all that power and wealth belonged to pharaoh, even though he was graciously pleased to allow his subjects to use some of it!
Although Amenhotep III built many temples and palaces and was responsible for many statues of himself and of the gods, perhaps the greatest symbol of his power was his mortuary temple, built - like all mortuary temples - on the west bank of the Nile, the direction of sunset and death. The temple covered 35 hectares and was the lagest religious building ever constructed by a single man. (Although it is smaller than the massive temple of Karnak, that was built over many centuries by a succession of pharaohs.) When we visit the Colossi we like to point to a small white dot in the distance and tell our groups that that is a stele which once stood in the rear wall of the temple, while the Colossi guarded the entrance at the front.
Like other temples in Egypt, two large statues of the founder of the temple stood either side of the entrance gateway, but in Amenhotep III's temple those statues weren't just large - they were huge. The seated statues are 60' high and were probably originally cut out of a single block of stone each. The southern statue is still a single piece of stone, but the northern statue has a large crack running through it and the upper part of the statue is made of five courses of sandstone which may be the work of Septimius Severus.
Although the temple appears to have been magnificent, its position on the flood plain meant that the walls were constantly undermined by running water, the building itself was flooded and suffered water damage, and within two hundred years of Amenhotep III's death the building was in a ruinous condition. Later pharaohs used it as a convenient quarry for their own buildings prudently situated out of reach of the flood waters, with the result that the temple has completely vanished.
When I first visited Egypt the Colossi stood alone in the fields, crops of wheat waving gently around their feet. As tourism increased, the area around the Colossi was first cleared and then, some years ago, fenced off so that today you cannot get near enough to touch or worse still, climb on them (which is a good thing!) If you visit the Google Earth reference given at the start of this essay you can get an idea of just how huge the temple was from the area that has been left unploughed and unplanted.
In the last few years excavations have started and the archaeologists are finding that the temple isn't quite as vanished as they had thought. Not only are they uncovering the foundations of the various halls and chapels that made up the temple, but they are also finding a large number of statues in varying states of disrepair.
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| The newly discovered head of Amenhotep III. Parts of the body have been found and the hope is that the complete statue can be reconstructed. |
The latest announcement is that a huge head of Amenhotep III has been found in near pristine condition. Made of red granite, the head is another part of a statue found some time ago. These fragments include the ceremonial beard, the inscribed slab at the back of the statue (representing the back of the royal throne) and other parts of the body. It is all part of what some have described as a "cache" of around 84 statues or statue parts which may have been buried by the priests to preserve them from further desecration.
Dr Hourig Sourouzian, who has been leading the archaeological work since 1999, goes into rhapsodies about the statue in her press releases, claiming that "Other statues have always had something broken: the tip of the nose, the face is eroded, but here, from the tip of the crown to the chin, it is so beautifully carved and polished, nothing is broken."
A missing chin seems to me to be a fairly substantial defect, but I suppose we can excuse Dr Sourouzian's enthusiasm: the discoverer always thinks that his discovery is the most wonderful that has ever been made. It would be churlish not to congratulate the team on their discovery, but it doesn't really add anything to our knowledge of ancient history and isn't worth the hype that has been generated about it.
© Kendall K. Down 2010
