A History of Ancient Egypt by Marc Van De Mieroop

Author:Marc Van De Mieroop
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781444359190
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Amenhotep Ill’s divinity and his building projects

King Amenhotep III sponsored more building activity than anyone else in his own time and for the rest of the New Kingdom. Only Rameses II, who ruled much longer (67 instead of 38 years), left behind more architectural remains and statuary, not least because he could usurp many of Amenhotep Ill’s monuments. Numerous architectural remains of Amenhotep III had a monumentality unseen since Old Kingdom times, and he commissioned many statues that were colossal in size. The most famous of those are the so-called Colossi of Memnon (Figure 8.1). These are two massive monolithic statues of the seated king, 65 feet (20 meters) high and weighing 720 tons, which stood in front of his mortuary temple in western Thebes. Because one of them began to make a whistling noise at dawn after an earthquake in 27 BC, Greeks in Egypt associated it with the Homeric hero Memnon, the son of the goddess of dawn, Eos, to whom he sang. The name “Colossi of Memnon” has survived into modern times, and throughout the ages the statues have fascinated those who visited them. The Roman emperor Septimius Severus repaired them in the 2nd century AD – and stopped the whistling sound.

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