mystic to Thebes. Damis describes the statue as that of a young and beardless man,' whose eyes sparkled, and whose lips spoke as they faced the rising sun, and who appeared to bend forward in an attitude of salutation. As the evidence summarised above proves that Memnon was at the time of Apollonius's visit only a sundered and headless block of stone, the philosopher is not to be congratulated upon these practical testimonials to the veracity of his Boswell.

3

From the fact that the last attested instance of Memnon having spoken was in the reign of Septimius Severus, it may be inferred that something must then have happened to suspend the continuance of the sound. We know from his biographer that the Emperor himself visited the statue-the last of the Caesars who did sothough, as no inscription is found containing his name, it is almost certain that he was unsuccessful. These circumstances supplied M. L'etronne with the very clue which was lacking to explain the restoration described in an earlier paragraph of this article. His reasoning may be held to have established that the five tiers of sandstone were added by Severus in the desire to propitiate the mute divinity and to reawaken his full powers of utterance. The futility of these pious intentions, and the coincidence of the repair of Mem

1 Both colossi were almost certainly bearded; vide the statues of Amunoph III. in the British Museum.

2 Philostratus, De Vita Apollonei Tyanei, lib. vi. c. 3, 4; cf. Heroica, c. 4, and Imagines, lib. i. c. 7.

Spartianus, c. 17.

non with the commencement of his long silence, will have an important bearing upon the discussion that will presently follow.

The later history of Memnon may be dismissed almost in a sentence. From the beginning of the third century A.D. a cloud of impenetrable darkness settles down upon his fame and fortunes, and no suspicion was entertained that the vocal image still existed at Thebes till it was re-identified between 1737 and 1739 by Pococke, who copied some of the inscriptions and published in his travels a description and drawing of the statue. Norden, the Danish traveller, had visited the spot in December 1737; but from the report which he sent to the Royal Society in London, in 1741, it does not appear even to have crossed his mind that the northern Colossus was that of Memnon, though he copied a few of the inscriptions and made a drawing of the lower half of the figure. From that time onwards the investigation proceeded with ever-increasing interest, notwithstanding that the natives, till prompted by foreign tourists, persisted in describing the images as those of a male and female, whom they called Shaama and Taama, thus unconsciously, even in their ignorance, preserving the original and authentic name.

There remain two points of considerable interest before I pass to the explanation of the socalled miracle. These are the nature of the sound and the conditions under which it was heard. I

have shown that it was described by Strabo as the kind of noise resulting from a slight blow, and by Pausanias as resembling the snapping of a harpstring. The former idea is reproduced in one of the inscriptions,' where it is spoken of as a highpitched note, and is compared to the sound produced by striking brass; the latter is confirmed by the language of Juvenal (magicae chordae) and by the word crepare employed by Pliny. We may conclude that it was a clear, somewhat metallic, sound, varying in pitch and intensitysometimes a shrill, sharp, twanging note, at others a fainter and more ringing vibration.

Of the eighty-seven legible, or partially legible, Greek and Latin inscriptions upon the legs which have been collected by the indefatigable assiduity of a succession of scholars, thirty-three contain a reference to the hour or time of day at which the phenomenon was heard. On eighteen occasions it is mentioned as having happened at the first hour, or sunrise, on eight between the first and second hours, on six at the second hour, on two between the second and third hours, on three at the third hour. Two alone date the miracle before sunrise. Nine of the writers, including the Empress Sabina, testify to having heard it twice (sometimes, but rarely, on the same morning); four of them, including Hadrian, three times; two of them four times; and one, a soldier of the Third Legion, no less than twelve times. Two, of whom Sabina is

1 Corp. Insc. Graec. 4725.

one, relate that they failed on their first visit, but were more fortunate on the second. Another was not successful till the third time of asking. Septimius Severus, as we have seen, never heard it at all. Of those inscriptions, for the most part in Latin, which specify the month, twelve refer to February and eleven to March. These were by far the most propitious months, perhaps because they may have been then, as now, the favourite season for ascending the Nile. These figures, which are not without a distinct bearing upon the issue, tend to show that the voice of Memnon was most commonly heard at sunrise, as soon indeed as the rays fell upon the statue (cf. Strabo, Tacitus, Pliny, Pausanias and Lucian), but on some occasions not till a later period of the morning. The sound was far from uniform in its occurrence, as the small number of inscriptions, out of the thousands of persons who must have visited Memnon, would alone suffice to show; but those who repeated the experiment might expect in the long run to be rewarded for their persever

ance.

We are now in possession of all the facts available to assist us in the elucidation of the prodigy. Two alone of the many hypotheses that have been put forward are worth considering or present any features of probability. A multitude of wild conjectures, based on imagination, but claiming a pseudo-scientific or mechanical interest, crumble away as soon as they are touched by the merciless finger of fact. There remain the rival theories

that the voice of Memnon was a fraud practised by the Egyptian priesthood, and that it was a natural phenomenon to be explained by physical

causes.

The former theory was very popular a century ago, and found eager exponents among French writers and savants, who, during and after the Napoleonic expedition, took an absorbing interest in the monuments of Egypt. One of these, M. Langlès, wrote a special dissertation on the subject. Another, M. Salverte, the author of a work on occult science, even knew how the sound was produced. Between the lips or somewhere in the figure of the statue was a lens or mirror on which the rays of the morning sun, being condensed, were applied to the expansion of metallic levers, which set in motion a series of hammers, which in their turn struck the granite!

The theory of sacerdotal fraud found, however, its most powerful and plausible exponent in the English antiquarian Sir Gardner Wilkinson, in a paper read before the Royal Society of Literature in London, on December 18, 1833, in his Topography of Thebes (1835), in his Modern Egypt and Thebes (1843) and in the earlier editions of Murray's Handbook to Egypt; and was then repeated by a long sequence of writers. So eminent an authority may claim to state his own case, and accordingly the following passage is reproduced from the third of the above works (vol. ii. 158164), which may be taken to represent the matured opinions of the author: