Qualla: Colossi of Memnon https://qualla.com/colossi-of-memnon en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:34:06 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/colossi-of-memnon-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Colossi of Memnon https://qualla.com/colossi-of-memnon Colossi of Memnon: Introduction https://qualla.com/colossi-of-memnon/ Photo credit John Beasly Greene (American, born France, 1832 - 1856) (1832 - 1856) – photographer (American) Details on Google Art Project, Public domain. For a few centuries, one of these statues sang. At dawn, as the first sun struck the cracked quartzite, the northern colossus gave off a strange ringing note, sometimes likened to a snapping lyre string, sometimes to struck brass. Travelers came from across the Roman world to hear it, scratching their names and verses into the stone to record whether the god had spoken to them that morning. More than ninety such inscriptions still survive on the legs and base. The two seated giants of the Theban plain have been famous for as long as fame has existed, and they have outlasted almost everything they were built to guard.

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Image: John Beasly Greene (American, born France, 1832 - 1856) (1832 - 1856) – photographer (American) Details on Google Art Project | Public domain

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/colossi-of-memnon-wp/ssx4-colossi-of-memnon-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Colossi of Memnon: Guardians of a Lost Temple https://qualla.com/colossi-of-memnon/ Photo credit Than217 (talk)Than Ball, CC BY 3.0. The statues depict Amenhotep III, the pharaoh whose reign in the fourteenth century BC marked one of the wealthiest, most opulent moments in Egyptian history. He set them as sentinels at the gate of his mortuary temple, a complex so vast, around 35 hectares, that no later pharaoh...

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Image: Than217 (talk)Than Ball | CC BY 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/colossi-of-memnon-wp/ssx4-colossi-of-memnon-guardians-of-a-lost-temple.mp3 0:06 2 full Colossi of Memnon: Quartzite Across the Desert https://qualla.com/colossi-of-memnon/ Photo credit H. Grobe, CC BY 3.0. Each statue stands about 18 metres tall, platform included, and weighs an estimated 720 tons, carved from blocks of hard quartzite sandstone. The stone did not come from nearby. It was quarried near modern Cairo and hauled some 675 kilometres overland to Thebes, the blocks too he...

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Image: H. Grobe | CC BY 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/colossi-of-memnon-wp/ssx4-colossi-of-memnon-quartzite-across-the-desert.mp3 0:06 3 full Colossi of Memnon: The Statue That Sang https://qualla.com/colossi-of-memnon/ Photo credit Kurohito, CC BY-SA 3.0. The singing began with a catastrophe. An earthquake in 27 BC shattered the northern colossus, cracking it and toppling its upper body. Soon after, the broken statue started to make its dawn sound, and the Greeks, who had long since renamed the figures after Memnon, a hero of the ...

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Image: Kurohito | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/colossi-of-memnon-wp/ssx4-colossi-of-memnon-the-statue-that-sang.mp3 0:06 4 full Colossi of Memnon: Silenced by Kindness https://qualla.com/colossi-of-memnon/ Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 3.0. The voice did not last. Sometime around AD 199, by local tradition, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, who had visited the statue but failed to hear it sing, ordered the broken colossus repaired, its shattered upper tiers rebuilt in courses of fresh sandstone. The reconstructio...

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Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/colossi-of-memnon-wp/ssx4-colossi-of-memnon-silenced-by-kindness.mp3 0:06 5 full