Colossi of Memnon Tours & Tickets

Everyone stops at the Colossi of Memnon and almost nobody is told why they matter. Two enormous seated figures stand beside the road on the Luxor west bank, roughly eighteen metres high, weathered almost featureless, and the standard visit is a ten-minute photo stop between the ferry and the Valley of the Kings. That is a fair use of the time. It is also a shame, because the story attached to these two statues is one of the strangest in Egyptian archaeology.

They are Amenhotep III, and they were never meant to stand alone. They flanked the entrance to his mortuary temple, which was the largest temple ever built in Egypt, larger than Karnak. It is gone. Built too close to the floodplain, it was undermined by the annual inundation, shaken by earthquake and then systematically quarried by later kings for building stone. The colossi survived because they were too big to move and too hard to break up.

The statue that sang

In 27 BC an earthquake cracked the northern colossus. Afterwards, at dawn, it began to make a sound. Ancient visitors describe it variously as a lyre string breaking, a faint whistle or a human voice, and it seems to have happened around sunrise as the temperature changed, most likely as dew evaporated out of the cracked stone.

The Greeks and Romans had a ready explanation. They identified the figure as Memnon, a hero killed by Achilles at Troy and son of Eos, goddess of the dawn, and understood the sound as the son greeting his mother every morning. That was enough to turn the west bank into a tourist destination fifteen hundred years before Thomas Cook. Visitors came upriver specifically to hear it, and many of them scratched their names and verses onto the statue's legs and feet.

Those graffiti are still there and you can see them. They include the emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina, who visited in 130 AD and, according to the inscriptions left by their party, had to wait for the sound.

The singing stopped around 199 AD, after the emperor Septimius Severus had the statue repaired as an act of piety. The repair closed the cracks and silenced it permanently, which is either an irony or a moral depending on your temperament.

What is happening behind them

For years the colossi stood in front of an empty field. That has changed. An excavation and restoration project on the site of the mortuary temple has been running for two decades and has re-erected further colossal statues behind the original pair, along with sphinxes and standing figures of the king.

The result is that the site is slowly becoming a temple again rather than a roadside curiosity. If you have visited Luxor before, this is one of the few places where the view has measurably changed.

How long to give it

Ten to fifteen minutes is genuinely enough, and it is free to stop. Walk close enough to look at the sides of the thrones, which carry Nile gods binding the papyrus and lotus of Upper and Lower Egypt, and at the smaller figures of the king's wife and mother beside his legs. Then look for the Greek and Latin graffiti on the northern statue's lower legs.

Go early or late. There is no shade whatsoever.

Is it worth visiting?

It is not a destination, it is a stop, and that is the right expectation. But it is on the road you will already be travelling, it costs nothing, and once you know about the singing and the Roman tourists it becomes a much better ten minutes than a photograph of two damaged statues.