Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/358

 268 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Only one of those Theban temples which rise upon the left bank of the river is free from all trace of a funerary or commemorative purpose, namely, the temple at Medinet-Abou which bears the ovals of Thothmes II. and Thothmes III. It shows signs, moreover, of having been frequently enlarged and added to, some of the additions having been made as recently as in the time of the Roman Emperors. In this respect it resembles, in spite of its comparatively small size, the great temples upon the right bank of the river. Like them, its creation was a gradual and impersonal matter Every century added its stone, and each successive king engraved his name upon its walls. How to account for its exceptional situation we do not know. It is possible that those funerary temples of which we have spoken w^ere an original invention of the successors of Thothmes ; perhaps that constructed by Hatasu at Dayr-el- Bahari was the first of the series. However this may have been, the new type became a success as soon as it was invented ; all the other temples in the district may be more or less immediately referred to it. The great deities of Egypt, and more particularly those of Thebes, are never forgotten in them. They contain numerous representations of the princes in whose honour they were erected performing acts of worship before Amen-Ra, the Theban god par excllence, who is often accompanied by Mout and Khons, the other two members of the Theban triad. These temples were therefore consecrated, like almost all the other sacred buildings of Thebes, to those local deities which, after the establishment of that city as the capital of the hole country, became the supreme national gods. Those gods were as much at home in the temples of Pausanias {Attica, 42) shows us, however, that the Egyptian scholars of his time knew how properly to convey the name of the prince represented in the colossi to foreigners : " I was less struck by that marvel," he says, in speaking of some sonorous stone which was shown to him at Megara, " than by a colossal statue which I saAV beyond the Nile in Egypt, not far from the pipes. This colossus is a statue of the sun, or of Memnon, according to the common tradition. It is said that Memnon came from Ethiopia into Egypt, and that he penetrated as far as Susa. But the Thebans themselves deny that it is Memnon. They declare that it represents Phamenoph ($a/>tevo^), who was born in their own country " The story told by Philostratus (^Life of Apollonius, 1. vi. p. 232) of the visit of the sorcerer to Memnon, shows that in his time the colossus was surrounded by nothing but ruins, such as broken columns and architraves, fragmentary walls and shattered statues. Even then the monumental completeness of the " Amenophium " had vanished.