Colossi of Memnon

Two quartzite figures of Amenhotep III, each about eighteen metres high and weighing something like 720 tonnes, sitting alone in a field beside the road to the Theban west bank. Almost everyone stops here, because they are the first thing you reach — and because there is nothing else standing anywhere near them.

That emptiness is the point. The colossi were not built to stand in a field; they were the gateway figures of the largest mortuary temple ever built in Egypt, and everything behind them is gone.

Walk round to the sides and look at the thrones: small figures of the king's mother and of Queen Tiye stand beside his legs, and the side panels carry Nile gods binding the papyrus and lotus of the two lands.

Amenhotep III's temple covered some 35 hectares — larger than Karnak. It stood too close to the floodplain, and the annual inundation undermined it; later kings then quarried the ruins for their own building projects. Within a few centuries almost nothing was left but the two guardians at the entrance. Excavation continues on the site today, and more of it is slowly reappearing.

The statue that sang

An earthquake around 27 BCE cracked the northern colossus. Afterwards, at sunrise, it began to make a sound — described by ancient visitors as a lyre string breaking, or a faint whistling, probably caused by dew evaporating in the fractured stone as the temperature climbed.

It became one of the great tourist attractions of the Roman world. Greeks decided the singing figure must be Memnon, the Ethiopian hero killed at Troy, greeting his mother Eos, goddess of the dawn — which is why two statues of an Egyptian pharaoh are named after a character from the Iliad.

Roman graffiti

Visitors carved their names and their disappointment into the legs, and more than a hundred of these inscriptions survive. The emperor Hadrian came in 130 CE with his wife Sabina, and one of the poems left by a woman in his party records that they had to wait an extra morning before the statue obliged.

Around 199 CE Septimius Severus repaired the cracked stone, apparently as an act of piety. The statue never sang again.