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The dimensions of Egyptian colossal figures surpass those of any other nation. The sitting figures of Memnon at Thebes are fifty feet in height, and the Sphinx is twenty-five, and these are of granite. The number of colossal statues was almost incredible.
Hitherto anxious with respect to the state of things on the coast and in Greece, he had remained in the western half of Asia Minor, within call of his friends in Macedonia, at no time distant more than about 200 miles from the sea. Now intelligence reached him which made him feel at liberty to advance into the interior of Asia. Memnon the Rhodian fell sick and died in the early spring of B.C. 333.
Memnon meanwhile had hurried to the spot where the battering-ram had by this time dealt a second blow, shouting as he went to every man who was not a coward to follow him.
I took it into my head to sail up the Nile to Coptus, and thence pay a visit to the statue of Memnon, and hear the curious sound that proceeds from it at sunrise.
We loitered too long around the colossi of Memnon and the palaces of the plain. It is nearly noon, a noon consuming and mournful, which falls perpendicularly upon the red summits, and is burning to its deepest recesses the valley of stone. At the door of Amenophis we have to cajole, beseech. By the help of a gratuity the Bedouin Grand Master of Ceremonies allows himself to be persuaded.
It is useless to criticise this invention of the lying Greeks, to whose blinded conceit and carelessness we are indebted for the almost total darkness in which the records of antiquity are enveloped. The famous musical statue of Memnon is still seated on its throne, dignified and serene, on the plain of Thebes.
On him Memnon leaped, like a lion on a kid, but Antilochus lifted a huge stone from the plain, a pillar that had been set on the tomb of some great warrior long ago, and the stone smote full on the helmet of Memnon, who reeled beneath the stroke.
Nor so much, by the grey sea-waves, did ever the sea-bird sing, nor so much in the dells of dawn did the bird of Memnon bewail the son of the Morning, fluttering around his tomb, as they lamented for Bion dead.
"His figure was tall," he tells us, "and his bearing very noble; he had a finely moulded head, and thick white hair white from his youth; his brown eyes were soft, yet piercing; his nose somewhat of the 'semitic' type, which gave his face the cast of the young Memnon.
With equal haste and violence, the Oriental synod of fifty bishops degraded Cyril and Memnon from their episcopal honors, condemned, in the twelve anathemas, the purest venom of the Apollinarian heresy, and described the Alexandrian primate as a monster, born and educated for the destruction of the church.
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