Thompson, Joseph P.: Photographic views of Egypt, past and present (Boston, 1854)

CHAPTER XXI.

siemnon still sounds.

Upon the western plain of Thebes, about midway between
the temples of Medeenct Habou and the Memnonium, and
some thirteen hundred feet in advance of their line, are two
colossal statues that have sat upon their rock-built thrones
for three, thousand three hundred years, and that still sit
unchangeably amid the surrounding desolation. In some
respects these are the most interesting of all the ruins of
Thebes. They are not ruins, but remains ; for although one
of them — that renowned in history as, the " vocal Memnon "
— was marred more than two thousand three hundred years
ago, by the renowned Cambyses, yet it was afterwards
restored, and it exhibits few marks either of the violence
of man, or of the ravages of time. Just where Amunoph
placed them in the line of the majestic dromos, from his
eastern to his western palace temple, within seventy years
after the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, they now
stand; just as he had them chiselled, with the exception
of the repairs upon the vocal statue, they now look forth
over the plain with that contemplative majesty which the
old kings of Egypt chose as the type of their power.

And do not these monarchs of stone still assert the
dominion of the eighteenth dynasty of Thebes over this
plain? Who rules here now, but the spirit that invests
them with the contemplative majesty of that old dynasty ?
Not these puny, half clad Arabs, who by day scour the