Here I am testing out my brute strength. LoL.
A bird's eye view gone awry?
Two shorter figures carved into the front throne alongside his legs are his wife Tiy and mother Mutemwiya. On the sides of the colossi, there is a depiction of the Nile god Hapi, bending together lotus and papyrus plants, symbolizing the union of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Part of the northern colossus cracked during an earthquake in 27 B.C., thus collapsing from the waist up and breaking into two.
During its time, King Amenhotep III's temple was the largest and most opulent in Egypt, surpassing even the Karnak Temple in area size. For reasons not yet discovered, his temple was destroyed, and the colossi (or "El-Colossat" to the Arabs) were transported over 420 miles by land to the West Bank. Because each statue weighed 700 tons, they could not send them down the Nile. The Colossi of Memnon, named by the Greeks during their reign, sat majestically for 3,400 years on the West Bank of the Nile River. Incidentally, after the earthquake of 27 B.C., the fractured colossus could be heard singing:
"Following its rupture, this statue was then reputed to 'sing' every morning at dawn: a light moaning or whistling, probably caused by rising temperatures and the evaporation of dew inside the porous rock. The legend of the 'Vocal Memnon', the luck that hearing it was reputed to bring, and the reputation of the statue's oracular powers, travelled the length of the known world, and a constant stream of visitors, including several Roman Emperors, came to marvel at the statues. The mysterious vocalisations of the broken colossus ceased in 199 A.D., when Emperor Septimius Severus, in an attempt to curry favor with the oracle, reassembled the two shattered halves."
It's a shame that the repaired colossus was silenced. It would have been interesting to hear it sing. Who knows? Maybe the spirit of King Amenhotep III will find its voice and sing for its visitors again. Rest assure if that happened, I'll be on the first plane out to Luxor. LoL.
