Why so big?
Egyptian colossi were made to be seen from far away and from below. They stood at the doors of temples, in pairs or in rows, where crowds gathered on festival days, and they told everyone who had built the place and who protected it. A colossus, from the Greek kolossos, a statue larger than life, also worked as a stand-in for the king: priests made offerings to some of them, and ordinary people prayed to them. Size was a way of making the king present even when he was hundreds of kilometres away.
The stone mattered as much as the size. Granite from Aswan and quartzite from the quarries near Cairo are very hard, difficult to carve and almost impossible to wear away, which made them the right material for eternity. Below are the five largest that survive, from the biggest down, with their measurements and where to find them.
1. The Great Sphinx of Giza
The Sphinx is about 73 metres long and 20 metres high, the size of a six-storey building lying down. It was not built: the sculptors carved it out of a ridge of limestone left in the quarry where blocks were cut for the pyramids. It is usually attributed to Khafre (reigned around 2558-2532 BCE), whose pyramid rises behind it, and it shows a lion with the head of a king wearing the royal headcloth, the nemes.
Sand has buried it again and again. Around 1400 BCE the young prince Thutmose IV, so says the granite stela still standing between its paws, fell asleep in its shadow and dreamt that the Sphinx promised him the throne if he freed it from the sand. And the missing nose? It is often said that Napoleon’s soldiers shot it off. The drawings of the Danish traveller Frederic Norden, made in 1737, already show the face without a nose, and the fifteenth-century historian al-Maqrizi blames a Sufi who damaged it in 1378. Napoleon is innocent of this one.
2. Ramesses II at Abu Simbel
The four seated statues on the façade of the Great Temple of Abu Simbel are about 20 metres high, carved directly from the sandstone cliff in the thirteenth century BCE. They have the same pose and almost the same face, so from the river they read like a single message repeated four times. One of them lost its head and chest in an earthquake shortly after the temple was finished, and the pieces were left on the ground where they fell. In the 1960s the whole cliff was cut up and moved 65 metres higher to escape the waters of Lake Nasser.
3. The Ramesseum colossus
At the Ramesseum, Ramesses II’s mortuary temple on the west bank of Luxor, lie the broken pieces of a seated statue of the king in red granite from Aswan. Complete, it probably stood around 19 metres high and weighed about 1,000 tonnes, which made it one of the heaviest statues ever moved in antiquity. It fell long ago, and its torso and head now lie in the court where it stood.
The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, in the first century BCE, described a statue there with the inscription “King of kings am I, Osymandias”. Ozymandias is a Greek rendering of Usermaatre, Ramesses’s throne name. In 1818 Percy Bysshe Shelley turned the description into his sonnet “Ozymandias”, about the “vast and trunkless legs of stone” of a forgotten king.
4. The Colossi of Memnon
Two seated statues of Amenhotep III, each about 18 metres high with its base and weighing around 720 tonnes, still stand alone in the fields of the west bank of Luxor. They were carved around 1360 BCE in quartzite, a stone so hard that it was brought from quarries near modern Cairo, hundreds of kilometres away. They guarded the entrance of the king’s mortuary temple, the largest in Thebes, which floods and later builders destroyed almost completely.
Why “Memnon”? After an earthquake in 27 BCE cracked the northern statue, at dawn it began to give out a sound, probably caused by the warming stone. Greek and Roman visitors identified it with Memnon, the hero killed at Troy, greeting his mother Eos, the dawn. The geographer Strabo heard it. Tourists carved poems on its legs. Around 199 CE the emperor Septimius Severus had the statue repaired, and it fell silent for good.
Behind the colossi, a team led by Hourig Sourouzian has been reassembling statues of the same temple. In 2014 two standing figures of Amenhotep III, 12.92 metres high and weighing 110 tonnes each, were raised again at the northern gate, about 3,200 years after an earthquake knocked them down. They are the fifth giants on this list and the tallest standing statues of a walking Egyptian king.
Where can you see one indoors?
Most colossi could never be moved, but a few have been. In the atrium of the Grand Egyptian Museum near Giza stands an 11-metre statue of Ramesses II in red granite, weighing 83 tonnes. It was found in 1820 in six pieces among the ruins of Memphis, stood in a busy Cairo square from 1955 and was moved to the museum in 2018. Another colossus from the same temple, a 10-metre Ramesses in limestone with its legs broken off, still lies on its back in the open-air museum of Mit Rahina, on the site of Memphis.
Where to see them
The Sphinx is on the Giza plateau, close to the pyramids of the pyramid builders, and the Grand Egyptian Museum is a short drive away. Abu Simbel is a day trip from Aswan. The Ramesseum, the Colossi of Memnon and the standing statues of Kom el-Hettan are all on the west bank of Luxor, a few kilometres apart. Check opening times with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities before you go.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae” and “Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis”.
- Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project (H. Sourouzian), reports and press statements, 2014.
- Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC), University of Chicago, “The Ozymandias Colossus at the Ramesseum”.
- Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, I, 47; Strabo, Geography, XVII, 1, 46.
- M. Lehner and Z. Hawass, Giza and the Pyramids (2017).
- Grand Egyptian Museum, “The Colossal Statue of King Ramesses II”.
