Unfortunately, the temple was built largely of mud brick and lay in the Nile floodplain where it was subject to the annual inundation. When it was abandoned and regular maintenance ceased, its brick walls dissolved and the stones were taken away and used by later kings in the construction of their own memorial temples. As a result, little of the huge complex is visible. Indeed, for most visitors, the two huge statues of Amenhetep III, known as the Colossi of Memnon, stand in isolation, and most visitors have no idea that the statues were but a small part of a gigantic temple complex.
The statues are truly spectacular: each is cut from a single block of stone that stood over 20 meters (65 feet) tall and weighed a 1,000 tons. When their crowns were still intact and their bases fully exposed, they stood even taller. They were carved in beautiful orthoquartzite, one of the hardest stones known and extremely difficult to carve, brought by boat from quarries near Heliopolis, seven hundred kilometers (420 miles) to the north or from a quarry to the south–no one is yet sure. The choice of stone, Egyptologists believe, was due to the association of its red color with the solar cult.
Transporting the statues was one of the many major projects supervised by Amenhetep, son of Hapu, the brilliant official of Amenhetep III whose impressive career led to his eventual deification.
The “Chief Sculptor of the Great Monument of the King in the The northern (right) colossus shows Amenhetep III seated on a throne, the arms of which are carved Nile gods binding together a lotus and papyrus, symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt. Beside the king, at much smaller scale, stands his mother, Mutemwia. On the southern colossus, the king is shown with figures of Queen Tiy and an unnamed daughter.
The northern colossus was especially popular with ancient Greek and Roman travelers. In 27 BC, an earthquake cracked the statue, and for the next two hundred years it emitted an eerie whistling noise each morning as the sun rose and the temperature and humidity changed. Greek travelers claimed that this sound was the cry of Memnon, a mythical African warrior slain by Achilles in the Trojan War, to Eos, his mother and goddess of the dawn. To hear the statue cry was said to bring good fortune, and it quickly made the colossi a major tourist destination. Both colossi are covered with hundreds of Greek and Latin graffiti left by grateful visitors. The statue stopped its singing in AD 199, when Septimus Severus filled the cracks in an attempt to renew the statue’s appearance.
Visitors rarely do more at Kawm al-Haitan than stand in the awkwardly-located parking lot trying to photograph the colossi through a sea of tourists and tour buses. But there is more to see than just the two famous statues, and it is worth walking around the open field that defines the site. The colossi stood before the temple’s mudbrick first pylon. Originally, two other quartzite colossi stood before the second pylon and two alabaster colossi stood farther west before a third pylon. One of these huge statues fell in antiquity and has lain here for millennia, buried in silt. In 2001, a German expedition began work to re-erect it, although groundwater is making that work extremely difficult.
Amenhetep III was inordinately fond of sculpture. Egyptologists estimate that this temple alone had thousands of statues installed within it. Over 730 statues of Sekhmet were placed here, one seated and one standing Sekhmet for every day of the year, and these were only a small part of the hundreds of statues erected for other deities. Indeed, Amenhetep III’s memorial temple boasted the largest program of statuary ever undertaken in ancient Egypt. Its variety and quality is hinted at by a sphinx with the body of a crocodile that still stands on the site, by the 8–meter tall (26 feet) statues of the king posed as Osiris that once stood in the temple compound, and by the many statues usurped by Merenptah now displayed in the open-air museum in his memorial temple, immediately behind that of Amenhetep III. The king described his statuary on a great stela found west of his temple in 1896. The temple, he wrote, “is extended with royal statues of granite, of quartzite and of precious stones, fashioned to last forever.
They are higher than the rising of the heavens; their rays are in men’s faces like the rising sun....” On another stela, still standing at the western end of the temple, the king boasted that “when [the statues] are seen in their place, there is great rejoicing because of their size.” The king described the temple itself as “an everlasting fortress of sandstone, embellished with gold throughout, its floors shining with silver and all its doorways with electrum.” Even admitting that such texts are filled with hyperbole, archaeological evidence confirms that this must have been one of the most awe-inspiring buildings in the ancient world. At the western end of the site, recent excavations have exposed more of the temple, including a huge hypostyle hall. Preceding the hall lies a great solar court, and east of that a series of colonnades and courtyards. Typical of ancient Egyptian building practice, the huge columns were built directly on Nile silt with no attempt to lay a foundation. Little wonder they soon collapsed.
From" The Illustrated Guide to Luxor" by kent R.Weeks ,published by the American University in Cairo Press. Copyright © 2005 White Star S.p.a