188 Chapter 9
which were a tourist attraction in antiquity. Amenhotep III (Eighteenth
Dynasty) erected the twin statues of himself in about 1350 BC at his
temple on the Nile at Thebes. The Egyptians called the “singing” statue
Amenophis, Phamenophes, or Sesostris; the Greeks called it Memnon.
It was the northern statue— broken after the earthquake of 27 BC— that
produced a marvelous tone or “voice” at dawn. In Greek myth, Memnon
was the son of the goddess Eos and her undying mortal lover, Tithonus
(chapter 3). As king of the Ethiopians, Memnon allied with the Trojans in
the Trojan War. Some observers fancied that the speech or song uttered
by Memnon’s statue at sunrise was meant to console his mother, Eos,
“Dawn.” The rays of the sun made his eyes gleam, and the sound was
heard “as soon as the sunbeam reached his lips.” Visitors experienced
the eerie sense that Memnon was on the verge of rising from his throne
to greet the new day. 18
The Roman historian Tacitus (Annals 2.61) noted that when struck by
the sun’s rays, Memnon “gives out the sound of a human voice, while the
pyramids, made by the vast wealth of kings, loom like mountains in the
impassable wastes of shifting sand.”
Some proposed that the sound
was the result of the sudden ex-
pansion of the stone from the heat
of the rays of the rising sun, per-
haps activating internal levers that
were attached to vibrating strings.
(Perhaps a similar effect caused
the Golden Charmers to “sing”
at Delphi, chapter 7). Visiting the
statues at sunrise in about 26 BC,
the geographer Strabo and his
friends (17.1.46) heard the sounds
but could not be sure whether they
came from the statue or from some-
one standing at the base. The main
character in Lucian’s satire Philo-
pseudes (33; second century AD)
claims to have heard a “proph-
ecy” uttered by Memnon at dawn,
Fig. 9.2. The Colossi of Memnon, Thebes,
Egypt, photo by Felix Bonfils, 1878. HIP / Art
Resource, NY.