FRAGMENT OF THE GREAT COLOSSUS AT THE MEM- 
NONIUM, THEBES. 
It has been found impossible to reconcile what exists of this Temple with the account 
given by the ancients of the form, character, and exact locale of the famous Memnonium. 
If the enormous statues of Damy and Shamy, the northernmost of which is, un¬ 
questionably, the Memnon of Strabo, were as he states in a building called the 
Memnonium, or placed like the statues before the great propylon of Luxor, this 
structure must have been destroyed since his time, as well as the Temple of which 
it formed a part. Various remains are found, and the plan of a vast structure 
may be traced, which will bear out the statement of Strabo. What, then, is the 
building now called the Memnonium ? Some profound investigators have agreed to 
consider it as the tomb of Osymandyas. It has also been called the Ramseion, 
which Mr. Birch, whilst he adopts it, says is a hybrid Greek term for the Egyptian 
Ei-en Ramos, or abode of Ramses, and has been applied to a magnificent pile of 
buildings called by Hecatasus the tomb of Osymandyas, and by more recent writers 
the Memnonium. There are many reasons, he adds, for believing it to be either 
this famous tomb, or else modelled upon it. But others look upon it as the palace, 
or palace-temple, of Remeses III., or Sesostris (antiquaries have not yet settled whether 
Remeses II. or III. is the Sesostris of the Greeks), the greatest of Egyptian monarchs, 
whose monuments decorated Egypt and Asia from the rock-temples of Aboo-Simbel 
to the tablets hewn in the rock near the road between Ephesus and Sardis. 
The great propylon of this Temple is in ruins, the lower part only has some 
remains of the records of the victories of Sesostris; and little exists of what was 
probably not inferior to the Temple of Karriak. The figures on the columns in 
this view were typical of Osiris, though portraits of Remeses—a practice of the 
Pharaohs to place their own resemblances on the figures of their gods. This fragment of 
the Temple, with a portion of a lateral corridor of circular columns, with capitals of 
the budding lotus, is a beautiful and picturesque object. 
The fragment of a statue of Remeses II. is, however, the great wonder of the 
Memnonium. Hecatseus says that it was the largest in Egypt. It was formed of 
one stupendous mass of syenite, or granite, from the quarries near Assouan, or Syene, 
and represented the king seated on a throne, with his hands resting on his knees. 
Its foot, judging from the fragments, must have been nearly eleven feet in length 
and four feet ten inches in breadth. The figure measures from the shoulder to 
elbow twelve feet ten inches, twenty-two feet four inches across the shoulders, and 
fourteen feet four inches from the neck to the elbow. It has now been overthrown, 
and the colossal fragments lie scattered round the pedestal. 
If it be a matter of surprise how the Egyptians could transport and erect a mass 
of such dimensions, the means employed to destroy it are scarcely less extraordinary. 
Had gunpowder been known it might easily have been effected: it is as probable 
that they knew the force of gun-cotton, which would have been even moi’e efficacious. 
