Photo : Holger Uwe Schmitt — CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Luxor · West bank
Colossi of Memnon
Two eighteen-metre statues at the roadside, all that stands of the west bank's largest temple.
Two seated figures of Amenhotep III, cut from quartzite. They guarded the entrance to his funerary temple, the largest on the west bank, of which nothing stands: an earthquake brought it down and its stone was reused elsewhere. A long-running excavation is at work on the ground behind them and has re-erected further colossi. The Greeks saw their hero Memnon in the northern statue: after an ancient earthquake it sounded at dawn — Strabo and Pausanias recorded it, Roman visitors carved their testimony on its legs, and imperial repairs silenced it.
The extra bit
A five-minute stop, but pick the right five minutes: at sunrise the light comes straight at them and brings the faces out; after midday it sits behind them and you will get silhouettes. It is the logical first stop coming off the ferry, before Hatshepsut.
Know before you go
No other monument on this bank is free, and none is over as quickly: you pull up at the roadside, with no ticket and no fence. There are a lot of sellers at this exact spot, and they are persistent, because every itinerary passes it. The ground around is under excavation and may be closed off, which changes nothing about the view from the road.
