Colossi of Memnon
The Colossi of Memnon ( Arabic el-Colossat or es-Salamat ) are two colossal ancient Egyptian statues from the 14th century BC standing side by side . Chr. You are in the valley of the Nile near the Valley of the Kings (Biban el-Moluk) in Western Thebes . In the past, the statues were in front of the pylons at the entrance to the Temple of Amenophis III. ( Egyptian Amenhotep III. ), a pharaoh of the 18th dynasty .
location
The Colossi of Memnon , so named in Greco-Roman times after Memnon , a semi-divine king of the Ethiopians , are located 77 meters above sea level west of the city of Luxor , about three kilometers from today's west bank of the Nile . You are directly north on the road to the necropolis of Deir el-Bahari with the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut and to the valley of the queens (Bibân el-Harîm) .
description
The quartzite statues are badly damaged. They represent King Amenhotep III. depicted sitting on a throne with his hands on his knees. He looks towards the Nile. The pharaoh's facial features are no longer recognizable. The crowns on the heads of the statues are also missing, but the Nemes headscarf is clearly visible.
On a much smaller scale, upright female figures are arranged on both sides of the legs of the statues, with the figure on each right leg the Great Royal Wife Amenhotep III. Teje and who on the left legs represent his mother Mutemwia . Of the four figures, that of Teje on the right leg of the southern statue is best preserved. The figures of an unnamed daughter of the Pharaoh, which were previously arranged between the legs of the Amenhotep statues, are only recognizable on the feet.
The sides of the throne are adorned with images of God and Egyptian hieroglyphics . You can see two depictions of Hapi , the god of the Nile inundation , how he ties lotus plants , as a symbol of Upper Egypt , with papyrus bushes , the symbol of Lower Egypt , to form a unified Egypt. The inscriptions identify the Gebel el-Ahmar quarry on the eastern bank of the Nile near Heliopolis, northeast of Cairo, as the origin of the building material. An analysis of the material from the Colossi of Memnon indicates, however, that the quartzite rock comes from the Gebel Gulab or Gebel Tingar on the western bank of the Nile near Aswan .
The statues, including the platforms (plinths) on which they stand, are still around 18 meters high today. With the crowns, the total height of both statues was originally 21 meters. The feet of the statues were 2 meters long and 1 meter wide.
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Southern statue
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Northern statue
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Dimensions of the southern statue:
- Dimensions of the base: 10.50 meters × 5.50 meters
- Base height: 3.30 meters (half pressed into the ground)
- Height of the statue: 13.97 meters
- Total height: 17.27 meters
Dimensions of the northern statue:
- Dimensions of the base: 10.50 meters × 5.50 meters
- Base height: 3.60 meters (half pressed into the ground)
- Height of the statue: 14.76 meters
- Total height: 18.36 meters
The scientists and engineers of the Napoleon expedition tried to determine the weight of the colossi. For the southern statue they calculated a volume of 292 cubic meters and a weight of around 750 tons, for the corresponding base a volume of 216 cubic meters and a weight of 556 tons. A more recent study carried out in 1971/72, on the other hand, calculated the volume of the southern statue to be 271 cubic meters and its weight to 720 tons (with a density of 2.65 checked on the stone material ). The new dimensions for the southern base result in a volume of around 190 cubic meters, with the same density this results in a weight of around 500 tonnes for the southern base.
history
Pharaoh Amenophis III, father of the "Heretic King" Akhenaten , ruled the ancient Egyptian New Kingdom in the first half of the 14th century BC. The seated figures of the Colossi of Memnon depicting him were made in 1379 BC. Built on the sides of the entrance to his funeral and memorial temple in Thebes, which stretched to the west behind the statues over an area of about 700 meters long and 550 meters wide. The temple was built largely from adobe, which promoted its later rapid decline. After the maintenance work was abandoned, the bricks of the Amenophis Temple in the Nile floodplains began to dissolve more and more due to the annual floods. More durable parts of the temple ruins were used by later pharaohs to build their mortuary temples.
During the reign of Pharaoh Merenptah , 1213 to 1204 BC. BC, most of the temple had already been destroyed or was used by it for its own mortuary temple. In 1896 the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie found a large stele in the northwestern temple of Merenptah on which Amenhotep III. described the statues of his temple. In Macedonian - Greek times from 332 BC. BC, the rule of the Ptolemies over Egypt, the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III appears. to have no longer existed. As today, the seat sculptures were perceived as individual colossal statues whose real meaning nobody knew anymore. Little is known about their state of preservation at that time.
While the severe damage to the statues was partly due to the incursion of the Achaemid King Cambyses II into Egypt in 525 BC. Other sources assume an earthquake in 27 BC. BC as the cause, which Strabon also reported. Cracks within the northern statue, a larger one from the head to the waist of the depicted pharaoh, led to spherical tones at sunrise, which led to the naming of the colossi after the Ethiopian king Memnon , which occurs in Greek mythology .
Mythological meaning of Memnon
Memnon was considered by the Greeks as the son of the " goddess of the dawn " Eos and Tithonos , the son of the Trojan king Laomedon . When Memnon supported his uncle Priam , at that time King of Troy, with a large fleet in the tenth year of the Trojan War , he was killed at the gates of Troy by the Greek Achilles . His mother Eos abducted Memnon's body to Aithiopia and continues to mourn it. Her tears, which fall as dew from heaven every morning, touched the supreme Olympian god Zeus so much that he granted Memnon immortality. Since then, he has been answering his mother Eos every morning with a wail when she strokes him with the first rays of sunshine, a fitting association with the noises that escaped the right statue of the Colossi of Memnon in Thebes in Upper Egypt every day at sunrise, which probably originated in vibrations from the great fracture point of the colossus should be sought in the rapid passage of the nightly cold through the warming of the first rays of the sun. In older German texts, the expression Memnonssäule, short for Memnon's statue, is found for the resounding statue .
Meaning of the statues
The statues were a popular destination for Greek and Roman travelers as it was said to bring good luck to hear the wailing of Memnon. In the year 92 AD, the Prefect of Egypt , Titus Petronius Secundus , had an inscription placed on it that reported the event. The historians Tacitus , Pausanias and Philostratos also testified to the phenomenon. The traveling emperor Publius Aelius Hadrianus visited the statues in 130 AD with his wife Vibia Sabina in order to experience the unique audio event for himself. The poems of Julia Balbilla recall this visit .
Visitors put hundreds of Greek and Latin graffiti on both colossi . A restoration of the northern statue under Emperor Septimius Severus in 199 AD silenced the "Songs of Memnon". The name of the statues as the Colossi of Memnon and the area named after them Memnonia has been handed down for the whole of western Thebes.
Current projects
Lately the Colossi of Memnon have been freed from dirt, with the remains of paint from the statues being exposed. The excavations on the site of the Amenhotep Temple are carried out in collaboration with teams of German and Egyptian archaeologists.
See also
literature
- Ludwig Borchardt : The setting up of the Colossi of Memnons . In: Georg Steindorff (Hrsg.): Journal for Egyptian language and antiquity . tape 45 . Hinrichs, Leipzig 1908, p. 32-34 ( archive.org ).
- Armin Wirsching : How the Colossi of Memnon were transported and erected. Part 1: The transport on solid ground and on the Nile. In: Göttinger Miscellen . (GM) issue 233, Göttingen 2012; Part 2: Standing up in front of the temple. Issue 235, 2012.
- Armin Wirsching: Digression on the Colossi of Memnon. In: Wirsching: Transporting and erecting obelisks in Egypt and Rome. 3rd edition, Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2013, ISBN 978-3-8334-8513-8 .
Web links
- Ancient Theban sites: Colossi of Memnon
- Egypt and Sudan around 1840 - From Mehemed Ali's empire of Hermann Fürst von Pückler-Muskau
- Colossi of Memnon (with satellite image)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b The Megalithic Portal: Colossi of Memnon.
- ↑ a b c d e Luxor - Memorial Temple of Amenhetep III And The Colossi Of Memnon. ( Memento from January 2, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ a b c Colossi of Memnon. In: Ancient Egypt
- ^ Egypt: Colossi of Memnon
- ↑ a b c d Hourig Sourouzian, Rainer Stadelmann , Bianca Madden, Theodore Gayer-Anderson In: Annales du service des antiquités de l'Égypte. Volume 80, 2006, pp. 324 and 345.
- ↑ a b c d Giovanna Magi: Luxor. Casa Editrice Bonechi, Florence 2005, ISBN 88-7009-619-X , p. 28.
- ↑ JBP Jollois, RE DeVilliers: De Thebes, Section II. In: Description de l'Égypte . Volume 2. 2nd edition, Paris 1821, p. 159 ( books.google.com ).
- ^ RF Heizer, F. Stross, TR Hester, A. Albee, I. Perlman, F. Asaro, H. Bowman: The Colossi of Memnon Revisited . In: Science . tape 182 , no. 4118 , December 21, 1973, p. 1219–1225 , here p. 1220 , doi : 10.1126 / science.182.4118.1219 .
- ↑ PM History , Edition 3/2009 , p. 34.
- ^ Egypt and the Nile: Colossi of Memnon
- ↑ a b Egyptian monuments - Temple of Amenhotep III
- ↑ a b c Egyptian monuments - The Colossi of Memnon
- ↑ for example Christian Kosegarten: Memnon's statue. in letters to Ida. Lange, Berlin 1799, full text in the Google book search.
Coordinates: 25 ° 43 ′ 13.8 ″ N , 32 ° 36 ′ 37.6 ″ E