Two enormous seated statues standing in a field — all that is easily visible of what was once the largest temple in Egypt.
Two seated figures, badly weathered, about eighteen metres high, standing in an open field beside the road on the Luxor west bank. Almost every visitor stops here, usually for ten minutes, usually on the way to somewhere else.
They are worth understanding rather than just photographing, because what is missing is more remarkable than what is there.
They are the gateposts of a building that is essentially gone. Behind them stood the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III, which by area was the largest temple ever built in Egypt — larger than Karnak. It was built too close to the flood plain, undermined by the annual inundation, and quarried for stone by later kings. Standing between the colossi and looking at empty ground is the point of the stop.
Excavation behind them has been running for years and has raised more colossal statuary back to standing. The site is visibly changing, which is unusual in Egypt.
And they have the best story in Luxor. After an earthquake in the first century BC cracked the northern statue, it began emitting a sound at dawn — usually explained as air moving through cracked stone as the temperature rose. Greek and Roman visitors came specifically to hear it, identified the statue with Memnon, a hero of the Trojan War, and carved their names and their disappointment into the base. Those graffiti are still legible. When the statue was repaired under the Romans, it stopped singing and never resumed.
Both statues depict Amenhotep III, seated, with smaller figures of his mother and his wife Tiye beside his legs. They were cut from quartzite and hauled to the site.
Each figure was carved from a single enormous block, quarried near modern Cairo and moved some six hundred kilometres upstream — a feat of logistics that impressed the ancients themselves, and one still argued about, which for objects in the region of seven hundred tonnes apiece is fair.
The song had celebrity witnesses. The emperor Hadrian came to hear it with his court in 130 AD, and the court poet Julia Balbilla carved commemorative verses into the stone that can still be read today.
The temple behind them covered an enormous area and was decorated with hundreds of statues. Its stone was reused extensively by later pharaohs, and the flood plain did the rest.
The name Memnon is Greek, not Egyptian — a misidentification that stuck for two thousand years.
Any time. Morning light is on the faces.
Opening hours: Open ground, accessible at any reasonable hour.
Opening hours and ticket prices may change. Please confirm the latest details before visiting.
The village of the men who cut and painted the royal tombs — the most completely documented community to survive from the ancient world.
The southern valley of the Theban necropolis, where queens and royal children were buried — and where the finest painted tomb in Egypt is cut into the rock.
A sunrise flight over the west bank — temples, tombs, sugar cane fields and the Nile, from a few hundred metres up.
The mortuary temple of Ramesses III — the best-preserved painted colour of any large temple in Egypt, and almost always empty.
Three colonnaded terraces cut into a cliff wall at Deir el-Bahari — the mortuary temple of the woman who ruled Egypt as king.
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Morning light is on their faces — they look east over the river, which is exactly why the dawn sun once made the cracked statue sing — and by afternoon the sun is behind them.
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