Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III

Start with the sound. Out here on the west bank of the Nile, the morning air carries the creak of a donkey cart and the hiss of irrigation water moving through the fields. Then you look up. Two enormous stone kings sit side by side above the sugarcane, their faces worn smooth by more than three thousand years of wind. They are the first thing everyone sees. But they were never meant to stand alone.

These two seated giants once guarded the entrance to the largest temple ever built on this side of the river. It belonged to Amenhotep the Third, a pharaoh of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty. He ruled in the early fourteenth century before Christ, during a long period of peace and great wealth. His temple stretched back from these statues toward the cliffs, gate after gate, court after court. Today most of it lies flat under the soil. The colossi are what remains standing.

So what was a mortuary temple? In ancient Egypt, kings were buried in hidden tombs in the Valley of the Kings, behind the hills in front of you. The temples for their worship were built separately, down here near the cultivated land. Priests made offerings in these temples to keep the dead king's spirit alive and fed, ideally forever. The village of Deir el-Medina, just up the slope, housed the craftsmen who cut and painted those royal tombs. This whole landscape was organised around the death and memory of kings.

Now look closely at the statues themselves. Each one shows the king seated on a throne, hands resting on his knees, facing east toward the rising sun. They are carved from quartzite, a hard, glittering sandstone. The stone was hauled here from quarries far to the north. Each figure is roughly eighteen metres tall. Down beside the legs, smaller figures stand at knee height. These are women of the royal family, including his principal wife, Queen Tiye, and his mother.

Here is the first surprise. Amenhotep chose to build his temple very close to the river, on low ground. Every year, the Nile flood would have spread across the outer courts. Some scholars think this was deliberate. The rising water may have echoed the Egyptian creation story, in which the first land emerged from a primeval ocean. It was a beautiful idea. It was also a structural problem. Over the centuries, the water weakened the foundations year after year.

The flood was not the only threat. Earthquakes shook the region, and walls and columns came down. Later pharaohs then treated the ruined temple as a quarry. They carried away its blocks and statues for their own building projects. This is why so little stands above ground today. The temple was not simply forgotten. It was taken apart, piece by piece, and rebuilt into other monuments across the west bank.

One of those reused stones became famous in its own right. A large inscribed slab from Amenhotep's reign was later carved on its back by the pharaoh Merneptah. That second inscription, now known as the Merneptah Stele, contains one of the earliest known mentions of the name Israel. The stone was found in Merneptah's own temple, not far from here. A single block from this site ended up as one of the most discussed texts of the ancient world.

Now to the legend that made these statues famous in classical times. In the late first century before Christ, an earthquake cracked the northern colossus. After that, travellers reported that the statue made a sound at dawn. Some described it as a sigh, others as the snapping of a string. Today, many people think the warming stone and evaporating moisture caused the noise. But Greek visitors had a more poetic explanation.

The Greeks linked the statue with Memnon, a legendary king who died fighting at Troy. In their story, Memnon's mother was Eos, the goddess of dawn. So each morning, according to the legend, the son greeted his mother with a cry. The name stuck. Even now, these figures are known as the Colossi of Memnon, although they show an Egyptian pharaoh with no link to Troy at all.

Here is the second surprise. Look at the lower legs of the northern statue. They are covered in ancient graffiti, carved in Greek and Latin by Roman-era tourists. Visitors wrote down their names and whether they heard the sound. The Emperor Hadrian came here with his wife Sabina, and a woman in their party, Julia Balbilla, carved verses about the visit. Later the statue was repaired, and the sounds were reported no more. Tradition says the restoration silenced it.

Behind the colossi, the story is far from over. Since the late 1990s, an international team led by the archaeologist Hourig Sourouzian has worked across this field. They have pumped out groundwater, lifted fallen statues from the mud, and set some of them upright again. Further back, you may see more colossal fragments and rows of statues of Sekhmet. She was the lioness-headed goddess of war and healing. Excavators have recovered many of her images here, and others now sit in museums around the world.

As you walk the site, notice the ground under your feet. It is soft and dark, the soil of the floodplain, not the pale desert sand of the cliffs. Notice how farms press right up against the ancient stones. Local life and ancient ruins sit side by side here, with no gap between them. The work of the excavators is often visible too: fenced areas, protective covers, and blocks laid out in careful rows on the ground.

Before you leave, turn back toward the two kings. They have sat in this same position since before the founding of Rome. Their faces are gone now, and their temple lies mostly under the fields. Yet they still face the sunrise, exactly as their builders intended. Listen once more to the water in the channels and the voices from the road. Then take one last look at the cracked stone of the northern giant, and remember the travellers who stood here at dawn, waiting for it to speak.