The Language of Ruins

Abstract

A colossal statue, originally built to honor an ancient pharaoh, still stands in Egyptian Thebes. Damaged by an earthquake, and re-identified as the Homeric hero Memnon, it was believed to “speak” regularly at daybreak. By the middle of the first century CE, the colossus had become a popular site for sacred tourism; visitors flocked to hear the miraculous sound, leaving behind over one hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions. These inscriptions are varied and diverse: brief acknowledgments of having heard Memnon’s voice; longer lists by Roman administrators including details of personal accomplishments; and elaborate elegiac poems by both amateurs and professionals. The inscribed names reveal the presence of emperors and soldiers, provincial governors and businessmen, elite women and military wives, and families with children. This study is the first complete assessment of all the inscriptions considered in their social, cultural, and historical context. The Memnon colossus functioned as a powerful site of engagement with the Greek past for a broad segment of society. The inscriptions shed light on attitudes toward sacred tourism, the role of Egypt in the Greco-Roman imagination, and Homer’s cultural legacy in the imperial era. Visitors sought a “close encounter” with this ghost from the Homeric past anchored in the Egyptian present. Their inscriptions idealize Greece by echoing archaic literature at the same time as they reflect their own historical horizon. While Memnon’s voice falls silent by the end of the second century CE, the statue finds new worshippers among Romantic poets in nineteenth-century Europe.