The Singing Colossus of Memnon

Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking about stones that sing, and we'll sing the phrases of stones that talk and sing. That's right. And we started things off here with an expert from Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Colosseum, which directly mentions the Colossi of Memnon, which which is the prime thing we're gonna be talking about today. These these two statues, these two stone coloss i, one toppled and then rebuilt, and then

another that still stands the test of time. And one of them, the toppled colossus, is said to have emitted sounds, at least in ancient times. I love the idea that posts as all ruins must sing. Really, yeah, because they kind of do. Ruins are Why do we love ruins so much? We actually talked about this in another episode recently. Uh they seem to suggest something about the folly of

human civilization. Yeah, I mean which that that's of course brings us to to Shelley's Osa Ma Andiez, which it is said was also at least partially inspired by these particular ruins. Right, look on my work, see Mighty and Despair, which which takes on a meaning different than the king originally meant. Right, So he's saying, look on my work, see Mighty and Despair, and you would despair because he's so powerful and he's gonna bash your head in if

resist him. But of course we should look on his works in despair because now there's not much left except the loan and level sands stretching far away. Yeah, we cannot help but be enthralled by ancient ruins. And the thing is this was true in ancient times as well, because during classical Antiquity, UH, tourists such as tourists from throughout the Roman Empire would visit to the ruins of Thebes in Egypt, which was already ancient even in their time.

This is something we've touched on before about ancient Egypt. It's kind of like that fact about dinosaurs where you know, more time separates like the stegosaurus from the Tyrannosaurus rex than separates us from the Tyrannosaurus rex. Uh. If you were to go back to ancient Rome, there was stuff from ancient Egypt that was older to them than ancient Rome is old to us. Yeah. It's it's mind boggling to think about, isn't it that these people who are ancient to us Day's gaze back in time at an

even more ancient people that were just as ancient to them. Yeah. I mean on the scale of Egyptian civilization, ancient Rome is fairly modern. Yeah, right down to the disrespectful tourist graffiti, right. Because the Roman tourists, when they would they would come out and they would look at the the two stone Colossa or the Syringes as they would also call them. They would make little notes on the base of the fallen colossus describing what they saw and or heard, uh

maybe even who they were and when they visited. It was kind of like a an ancient trip Advisor page. Yeah, and we can talk more about those inscriptions later because they tell us interesting things about the history of the statue or the statues and how people experience them. But so, what what are these colossi, the colossi of Memnon that

we're going to be focusing today. Primarily they are what remains of the Great Temple of m in Office the Third or m and Hotep the Third, who was a pharaoh of Egypt in the fourteenth injury b c. That's right, And there's a there's at least one level of misinterpretation that gets thrown on top of of these ruins as well discussed. But why we're talking about them today, I mean, obviously we love any chance to talk about ancient ruins and and uh and in olden times. But there's a mystery.

There's a mystery here, yes, and that in the mystery here is that for a period of time, uh mere centuries really, in the longer lifespan of these uh, these two statues, they were said to speak or to Emit sounds that is often described as like the cracking the breaking of a liars string. Sometimes people allude to it as more of a voice. But everyone seemed to view these more or less as some sort of a natural

phenomenon that was taking place. I've read it described as a harp, or as a twang, or as a breaking string. Uh so, yeah, very interesting. Why now that that would be different if we were reading reports from the ancient world that people went to, say, a statue of a ruin of a statue in ancient Egypt, and that it told them what to do, right, right, they have some sort of an oracle, right, then we would start to think, Okay, these people may be listening to I don't know, wind

sweeping over the sand and think they hear something. There may be a bit of paradolia going on, their auditory paradolia, or they might just be hallucinating. But no, these are sounds that are described as sort of mechanical sounds, and they're described in a very lucid way that seems to indicate there really was probably some sound coming out of the statues. We're not just getting like embellished stories of

people having a rapturous experience. Yeah, there's a sense that this is a curiosity, that this is um you know, it's it's like, oh, this this statue is emitting a sound and it's the darndest thing. It's not a matter of the gods are speaking through it, at least not in a literal sense tho. Though though some historians doom have some fun with the sort of mythological ramifications of this,

right that gets laid on it. But there is enough reporting of the straightforward character of the sound that it does seem like these statues probably just made some sort of sound. So what was the sound? Uh, that's what we're going to be exploring today, and we are going to be referring to a couple of key resources, right, that's right. So the first, and i'd say really the main source here is Miracle of Memnon, and this is by G. W. Bauer Sock, published in the Bulletin of

the American Society of Paparologist nineteen eighty four. And then we also refer to Memon the Vocal Statue by Massimo Patirino, published in the International Phonetic Association. That was a little more conspiratorial, but we can get into that later. But yeah, before we get into the theories about the sound, the origin of the sound, we should talk about the origin

of the class eye themselves. Like we said, there are these two great statues, and we mentioned they were built by this pharaoh I'm in office or m and Hotep the third. That's right. He was a powerful ruler, and it's it's said that his excess served as a catalyst for the cultural revolution that that followed him, posed by his son and successor, Kinnaton, who many of you might remember.

He's best remembered for abandoning the polytheistic religion of the past in favor of the monotheistic worship of the Sun disc Otten, and then of course after after his death, the worship of Otten was was then abandoned in favor of the polytheistic model that was previously established. Yeah, I don't think his model quite caught on right, But you know, sometimes you got to rebel against your your your parental

units and and make a statement. Here's a question, just generally, do you think it's harder to by force impose monotheism on a polytheistic culture or by force impose polytheism on a monotheistic culture. Well, you would think, I mean, just off off the hip, I would say that it would be easier to impose monotheism on poly is it seems like it's gone that way more often yeah, but I

mean clearly it didn't. It didn't take in this case. Granted, there's more employ here than merely h getting a bunch of people into a room and just sort of testing their opinions on different um models of religion. But I mean, basically, on on one hand, you could you would be making an argument that say, hey, actually this one guy do you all believe in? Well, actually there are many different avatars with this god, and I can see that working.

And then the other argument is, hey, all these gods that you believe in, well, actually they're one god and you're just looking at different faces of the one true Being or something to that effect. Right, So, if you're a king like Akat and then you want to impose a new paradigm for the religious views of your country, there's a lot of theological wiggle room for you to play with. It's not just like stop believing in that. Believe in this now, yeah, I mean, if if you

if you do it right, right. But but anyway, like we said, this change did not really take. But but but let's get back to I'm Inhotep the third again. He was a powerful ruler. He made powerful statements in the way that ancient Egyptian rulers did, made statues, made temples, created these works of stone, and a lot of times when you look at the rulers of the ancient world building all these monuments, you know, to their own glory and to themselves, it can look kind of ostentatious to us.

But another and I mean it probably would be fair to say it is kind of ostentatious. But on the other side, people have pointed out that the rule of Amenhotep the Third was a period of like cultural flowering in Egypt where it was sort of like the peak of artistic achievement in ancient Egypt. Yeah, so you can see why Houghton wouldn't really take off, right because everybody was probably in love with the with with with the

previous ruler and in the world he'd created. So it was kind of a golden age, right, And part of that golden age is the design of this temple for Amenhotep the Third on the west side of the Nile, all around Thebes, and this is now the temple where these these statues are what's left these statues now known as the Colossi of Memnon. Now, of course they're not statues of Memnon. We'll get into who Memnon is in

a minute. They are statues of the Pharaoh. I'm in Hotep, the third right, that's right, So let's let's just describe them a little bit. The landing page for this episode is stuff to Blow your Mind. Dot Com should feature a prominent image too, if I can make it work. But but there are plenty of paintings, illustrations and photographs of these statues. So each one is roughly sixteen meters high or fifty two ft uh. And they are both represent seated humans with large heads. But there there's a

key difference between the two. So the southern or left statue, this one survives as a single block of sandstone. This statue, though clearly ancient, is still in one piece. But then the north were there in a right statue. This is where he gets interesting. From the waist upward. Uh. If you look at it today, it's been hastily restored with

rough stone cuttings topped with the original head. Yeah, it looks like it fell apart from the waist up and then somebody put it back together with just like some blocks and then stuck ahead on it. Right. I've actually seen video and One of the funny things about it is because it has this block construction. Now there are all these gaps in it, and so I've seen videos of of people visiting these statues in modern times, and there will be birds living in the colossi of Memnon

in the the statue that's broken, the right statue. So it's got these gaps in it, and birds are just nesting in them and flying in and out all the time. It's pretty funny. Now. In earlier times, the top half would have been just toppled ruins with the head and other pieces strewn out on the ground beside it. And we mentioned all that ancient graffiti on them, right, Yeah, the eggs here on the toppled statue are inscribed with ancient graffiti one hundred and seven texts, but I've also

read a hundred and eight. Uh. Basically, it gets into a sort of a contest of determining how many you can actually decipher and uh and and and point out as individual inscriptions. Sixty one of them are in Greek, roughly forty five of them are in Latin, and there's

apparently one that's a bilingual inscription. And these inscriptions are from the first three hundred years of the Common Era, and they were inscribed by ancient tourists, and these would have been tourists of the Roman Empire or at least of the Roman Imperial period. Yeah. I can often see tourists going to ancient landmarks today and think that it's kind of gross, like the behavior that display you know,

do do in the selfies and all that. I don't want to criticize selfies too much, but you know, I mean, at least selfies don't damage you know, the physical structure exactly. Yeah, so tourists in the ancient world, we're actually much worse than we are today. They were trying to take pieces off of things and writing their name on things all the time. Yeah, that was pretty brutal, it is. But but as well discuss it did seem to take a while to get going, and they didn't necessarily seem to

be in the regular practice of doing this sort of thing. Though. Of course, there are plenty of examples of graffiti, uh from the Roman Empire, so it's not like someone invented graffiti at this point. But uh, it's certainly the graffiti on them non picks up over time. Now. The interesting thing again, is that we can look at these inscriptions though, and and and gain intel about what they saw when

they visited it. Right, So did they say I came here in whatever year the reign of Caesar whatever, and aliens were helping build structures. Well, no, not nothing on that scale, but they would give you know a time their name. Uh. And then the inscriptions also they give us an idea of what state the statue was in. They mentioned that the northern statue is missing, it's for half. And they also identified the statue as a likeness of

the Greek mythological figure Ethiopian king and uh Homeric hero Memnon. Right, so this is how we get to the classical name of the statue, the Colossi of Memnon, even though it's not supposed to be statues of Memnon. So who was this Memnon in Greek myth? Well, he was actually supposed to be the son of Aos, the goddess of Dawn, and Tithanus, a Trojan prince. And in this classic legend, Aos the goddess falls in love with this mortal man Tithanus,

but she realizes, oh he's a mortal man. He's going to die one day, and she weeps because that would be so horrible, and she moves Zeus with her tears, and Zeus very unfortunately grants Tiffannus the gift of eternal life, but without the accompanying gift of eternal youth. Yes, that is a that is a bad stu. But before the situation gets too bad, and does it get real bad,

the two of them have a son. So the goddess of Dawn Aios and the the now immortal former man Tiffanius, they have a son, Memnon, who is the king of the Ethiopians, and he comes to fight in the Trojan War, only to get killed by Achilles and then granted immortality by Zeus again because of the tears of his mother Aios. Well, first of all, if you're gonna die in the Aliad or or in the Trojan War in general, being slain by Achilles not a bad way to go. A lot

of people went that way. Yeah, I I was looking this up just for fun. Uh So, if if you look at just the Aliad, and you just look at at named characters that are killed within the Aliad, then Achilles has a kill count of about twenty four four confirmed kills and named characters, right, right, and and that's that's pretty good. I do have to point out that Patroclus uh Achilles's friend or possible lover depending on the interpretation, and Odysseus, our hero, they both have high kill counts

as well. And Odysseus's kill count is actually higher as one might expect. He's kind of the star. Odysseus is sneaky, he's cunning. So the ancient Roman tourists they referred to

this these statues as as mim Noon. They associated them with this figure of Memnon right, because there was a there was a strong influence of Hellenistic culture throughout the Roman Empire and much it was often referred to in many ways as sort of like the Greek world or the Greek speaking world, even while Rome was in power, right. And then they also had other ideas about the history

of the statute. For instance, they attributed it they attributed it its partial destruction to the invasion of Canvasses the second of the Acumenid or First Persian Empire. As to what actually caused the destruction, we can revisit that in a bit right right now. But the most important thing really for our purposes here is again, not that they just said who they were or when they visited these statues. It doesn't matter what they called them, how they misinterpreted

the past. It's about the sounds that they described. Again, the this the sound of a breaking of a liar stream, of a vocal sound, or even a crackle. And I do have to say it does play nicely into this idea of Memnon though, right, because Memnon's mother is the dawn, and so many of these inscriptions are certainly the historical text that referred to it. They they they say, when you're supposed to hear the crackle or the sound, it occurs at dawn. So there's this kind of communication between

the sun and this statue of allegedly Memnon. Yeah, that that was one of the ancient interpretations, was that dawn break, Aos would come over the horizon and shine her light onto this western statue on the western side of the nile, and then of course the son of Aos, mem On, would sing to his mother. Yeah, but of course he's broken. So it just comes out as a kind of a crack, all right, because it plays into this idea too, of this this fallen thing, this thing that was once great,

that is now reduced. H But these are of course all just sort of uh flavorful interpretations based upon the fact that it was making or seem to have been making, some sort of sound. All right, well, I think maybe we should take a quick break and when we come back we can discuss ancient descriptions of the sound the statue made and then get into what could have caused it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Alright, we're back, so let's discuss uh, the singing and a bit more detail here.

Bower Stock writes that the inscription tells us that quote often, as the sun rose at dawn, the surviving part of the colossus would admit a mysterious twanging sound that seemed to all who heard it unearthly and unforgettable. It seemed as if the god himself were speaking in some way. That he should be speaking from the waist down seemed not to any particular problem among the viewers, and he

did not oblige unfailingly every morning. Some visitors, including the imperial retinue with Hadrian, had to wait for the miracle to occur. Yes, supposedly they went there to hear it, and then it didn't happen. The first day, so they had to wait around for a while. And I think he touches on two details that are very telling here.

One that a famous person comes to view it and they have to wait, which does make it sound like it was it was indeed some sort of natural phenomenon that could not be depended upon and you just had to be patient with it, no matter how powerful you were. And then also the fact that it seems like if you were making the story up, it would be the head of the statue that's right there that would be speaking, not essentially like the legs and and groin region of

the of the broken Titan, right. I mean, there is a certain kind of symbolic joy you can get from the idea of a god's statue with a talking pelvis, But it just doesn't seem like that's what they'd really be producing if this was, say, a band of priests attempting to uh to trick people into thinking a statue made a sound, which is something that some people have proposed. Yeah,

you see this as we'll discuss. You see this this drift in the narrative as you deal with like second and third hand accounts where they basically tweak it, where like it'd really be a better story if it was the head speaking, etcetera. Okay, so Bowersock, at the time he was writing, summarizes what was generally thought about the production of the sound in the ancient statue, right, yes,

and he was. He was also referring to some of the writings of philosotrosts who would have lived around roughly one seventy through two forty seven CE. But he points out that that that we can be fairly sure that to what toppled this statue was an earthquake that we know occurred in in twenty six b c E. We have other historical accounts that reference the earthquake, so everything lines up there. But then as far as the earthquake damage goes, this is uh. This is the idea that

that Bowersock touches on quote. The earthquake damage evidently allowed air to penetrate well inside the colossus in such a way that the sudden warmth of the sun at dawn affected a noisy discrepancy between the quickly heated exterior and the still cool channels within. The sounding. Colossus was a great tourist attraction under the Roman Empire. The Greeks of

that age identified it with the mythical hero Memnon. At the end of the second century, A D. Septimius Severus repaired the statue, it is alleged, and thereby silenced it. So in this he touches on two really important facts here. First of all, a long standing theory as to how this sound was emerging from the top old colossus, that that it only started after the earthquake, that it only started after the earthquake damage. Yes, and then it ended

after the restoration of the statue. So you got this window, this window of the talking statue. It didn't talked before, and it didn't talk after, right, doesn't talk now if you visit it now that nobody is hearing a sound from this uh, this stone. So clearly something happened to it.

We're pretty sure it was earthquake damage, and it caused the stone to to speak, if you will, uh, on particular mornings when conditions were just right, and then someone came along and restored it and therefore caused the phenomenon

to to cease forever. So this particular summation Bowersock rides popped up in virtually every modern mention of the coloss I and likewise the the These these different modern interpretations leaned extensively on the writings of French archaeologist Jean and Anton Latron, who lived set eight uh, and he supported

the Severest hypothesis for the silencing of the Colossus. But Bowersock points out that all we really know is that Severus visited the coloss I in one fourth century St. Jerome did back up the notion that the sounds had east based on his visit. But the curious thing here is he assumed that it had stopped at the birth of Christ, because Christ had essentially put an end to

all this pagan nonsense. Now wait a minute, that sort of throws the timeline off, right, because we we were supposed to have it making sounds well into the second century, right there, the second century CE. Uh, So that would kind of not line up with the birth of Christ. But right, well, basically, I guess we're not positing that

as a real explanation. No, no, no, So this is an account, and I mean this is a case of someone showing up and saying, those things not making a sound anymore must have stopped at some point, probably when Jesus was born, because why would why would there be any kind of like pagan weird magic stuff going on under this new covenant. But ultimately he had no intel to go on there and was not bothering to read the trip Advisor reviews on the legs. Right, it's like

now the pharaoh's magicians can no longer do miracles themselves. Yeah, I mean, it's ultimately kind of ridiculous thing to say, but it's he's one of the many famous visitors. Uh. You see this pop up in various writings about the coloss I. Yeah, And most importantly, as as Bowersock points out, it does a test that by a certain point nobody

was hearing these sounds anymore. Right, But it also becomes difficult to really judge when it stopped based on the the end of the inscriptions, because it's likely they simply ran out of room to record it on the statues legs statues are that covered with inscriptions. But that being said, we can still look at the dated duh inscriptions on the statue and try and figure out when they stopped.

And uh, previously the last dated text used to be held as a one, which certainly does line up with this idea that that Severus visited in one, but later, as Bowersock writes, an description from two oh five c E was noted, and there's another superimposed over that, so Bowersock says, quote It therefore becomes quite impossible to imagine that the sound was terminated in one by Severust, so people were still reporting hearing the sound after Severust visited

right now. The earliest known description of the singing is from the geographer Strabo in twenty four b c E, and he described this the scene as everyone else did,

with one statue partially destroyed by an earthquake. Because this led many to assume that a known, again known and recorded earthquake from b c would have been the culprit and toppling one of the coloss i, though Bowersock he he adds that that Strabo is being a bit vague if he's describing an earthquake that occurred two years ago, but he admits that based based on the evidence, it seems that the sound was quote exclusively a phenomenon of

the Roman imperial world. So we still have a pretty solid time frame that we can look to in which this this uh this statue was generating a noise specifically it was sometime after b c E and stopping somewhere around down the end of the second century CE. Yes, okay, well about two years of a singing statue and bad yeah. Yeah. And during that time you have a lot of people visiting it, a lot of people been writing about it, uh, and then people writing about those writings or writing about

other people's interpretations of it. Strabo himself wrote about it in the first century d C. And then you had Bassanius come around and he wrote about it in the mid second century CE. And these two voices alone helped to make it famous. Yes. So Pausanius was a Greek geographer. He wrote about places all over the Mediterranean world. And so here's his piece on this, from the translation by Bostock and Riley quote, the colossus in Egypt made me

marvel far more than anything else in Egyptian Thebes. On crossing the Nile to the so called pipes, I saw a statue still sitting which gave out a sound. The many call it mem Non, who they say from Ethiopia over ran Egypt and as far as Susa. The Thebans, however, say that it is a statue not of Memnon, but of a native named famine Off, and I have heard

some say that it is cessastrous. The statue was broken into by Cambyses at the present day, from head to middle it is thrown down, but the rest is seated, and every day at the rising of the sun it makes a noise, and the sound one could best liken to that of a harp or a liar when a string has been broken. I like that, I really like that. But the interesting thing is that there is quite a bit of this. There are a lot of different UH

writings from the period that we tell this story. Some of them are first hand, and some of them have dubious descriptions of its state of disrepair or or the details about the sound. It clearly indicate that this was at at least a second hand UH description, if not a third hand description of of the phenomenon that was taking place. And then sometimes there's some of the writers just having fun with it. For instance, Uh Lucian the writer joked about the statue speaking to him through its mouth.

Wouldn't it have been funnier, though, for the statue to speak to him through its pelvis? Yes, through through the butt? Yeah? Well, you we can only wonder you know what versions of of mem Non inspired dirty jokes, etcetera. Body humor was was passed about during the ancient world. I mean, clearly people that did have a sense of humor in these times. People were more or less like they are today in many respects. So uh, there were probably ridiculous jokes about

Memnon speaking through its bottom. Uh. And of course plenty of the individuals just had some took some poetic license with Memnon as well. For instance, Roman poet Juvenal wrote that the sound was the voice of a melancholy god, upset over the destruction that was that was wrought against it, this time by Cambaesis, who again was the destroyer in many of the common tales about the statue, not the earthquake that we later found out was probably the real cause.

Right now, to come back again to this idea that that Severusts restored it, Bowerside points out that there is ultimately no evidence that this took place. Uh. Now, Severists certainly visited the area, and he could have visited the coloss I. I mean it certainly, it's lines up. It's

not like saying Charlemagne appeared and fixed the statue. Um. But he didn't leave any graffiti for what for what that's worth, but there also could have been very little space for him to inscribe it at that point anyway. But by the fourth century it certainly was a silent statue again by all accounts, and uh. And here we encounter commentators like Jerome who believed that well, it just it must have been silent for a long time um

Or for instance. We also have one commentator, Ammianus Marcel Lenis, for instance, who knew the coloss i but didn't seem to know the story of the sound. So we see like deep tales of the phenomenon beginning to pass out of common knowledge and not of common circulation. Someone it it stopped being the statue that speaks, and it became the statue that used to speak if you knew the stories.

And Bowersock goes on. He admits that while we don't have any real proof again that Severus ended the sound by restoring the statue, we we still have to figure out who might have restored it and then conceivably shut down the sound, because that does seem the best based on the timeline, that does seem to be what happened. Somebody restored the statue. Somebody messed with the with the remnants of the statue and in doing so ended the sound. Yeah,

they put a hand on the drumheads. Yeah, basically, uh. And Bowersock has a little pet theory about this, right, Yeah. He presents Queen Zenobia of Palmyra as a possible culprit here. So she led an Arabian army into the region um during this period, and during her occupy occupy of Egypt, she presented herself as a new Cleopatra. So she championed uh, the Egyptian greatness of old and uh, and and did so as like, you know, as a swipe at Roman imperialism.

This is not the country of the Romans. This is the country of the noble Egyptians, and I am one of you. And bowers I proposes that Zenobia and her son may have carried out several restoration projects in the area. That would make sense if she's trying to ingratiate herself at the locals. Yeah. So it ultimately makes more sense than severus because you can at least begin to in this. Again, it's a pet theory, but it at least involves more reasoning as to why this is taking place. Okay, well,

I think we should take another quick break. When we come back, we will discuss what could have made a statue making noises like like was reported for so many years. Thank thank alright, we're back. Now we're discussing what could have caused the Colossi Mimnon, the especially the one top old statue to make sounds as people reported at dawn for so many years. And so to look at that, I was like, Okay, are there other cases where stones

appear to sing or make noises? There are actually plenty of examples of things that are called singing stones, but what that tends to refer to is that they sing when struck, and that doesn't exactly fit the description of what's going on. Right. So there's one study fromen I came across in Time and Mind by Paul Devereaux and John Wosencroft, uh, and this was about the role that sound may have played in the selection of the huge stones at Stonehenge. Now you've probably read that, you know

the bluestones. These huge stones at stone Hinge Stonehenge were moved over great distance to their final location. They weren't just dug up out of the ground. And then placed where they are. Why would you go through the effort

of moving huge, gigantic stones so far? And the papers are reported on a project surveying once of a supposed source of the stones and asking quote, what might stone age eyes and ears have perceived in this landscape and what aspects made it become important to the builders of stoneheinge. So one factor that they come up with is that stones from this site in geologically similar sites nearby seem to produce a tone a ring when struck with a hammer.

It's not just the dull thud you'd get from a lot of stones, but but a more distinctive, tonal kind of ringing. And they say, you know, if if this is a religious site, this could have been a selection criterion. It seems intuitively hinge e right, that you'd want the stones to kind of ring and sing when you bang on them. Yeah, But but again, clear clearly this is not what's going on with the Colossi of m Non. Nobody's talking about striking the base of the toppled strat

statue and producing a noise. Yeah, And so there are other stones like this around the world, but it all always seems to be the same story that there are locations in the world with singing stones or stones that ring, but it tends to be when you hit them together with one another. And I've read about this a good bit.

It seems to be that there is it's hypothesized that there's something about the internal mineral structure of these stones where they're there are certain types of strain relationships between the minerals within them that produce this elastic effect that makes the stones more like a drum that kind of rings, and less like a thudding regular stone. But that's not apparently what's going on. We're not talking about people banging on it with a hammer. We're saying the light of

dawn comes in and then it twang's yeah. Likewise, I have read before various arguments about the the sacred aspects of caves for ancient people's uh, which of obviously, if you're in the cave and you make a sound, that sound will be echoed, and it could be various supernatural interpretations of that. But again, clearly that's with a cave, not with just a large statue. You can shout at a statue all you want, uh, and there may be some reverberation of of your sound waves, but but not

to to any like real practical extent. And that's not what people are described. Yeah, they're not they're not hitting it, they're not shouting at it. They're showing up. The sun is rising, and then there is this distinct crackle, and of course that leads us back to that heated air argument that we've already discussed. And this really, this really seems to be the one that most people are focusing on.

This seems to be curiously, it is a case where where ancient minds pretty much figured it out and nobody really has a more effective answer. Yes, so this is as put by bower Stock. Just to refresh you, bower Stock writes that quote, earthquake damage evidently allowed air to penetrate well inside the colossus in such a way that the sudden warmth of the sun at dawn affected a noisy discrepancy between the quickly heated exterior and the still

cool channels within. Now, I kind of wish we could have more detail on exactly what's going on there, but this does seem to be what most people are referring to. There's some kind of version of this, there's some heating difference, a difference in heat potential from the outside and the inside, and there are certain kind of cracks or channels within the stones that cause it to make some shifting, adjusting kind of sound. Yeah, now, I know what you're you're

all thinking. You're thinking, well, that sounds pretty good to me. Joe and Robert seim on board with it. Is there anybody that has a problem with this interpretation, and there

is so. Earlier we mentioned the article from the International Phonetic Association mem Non the Vocal Statue by Massimo Petterino, and Petterino does have a problem with this, he says, quote, the main objection against this kind of hypothesis is that the other colossus, which stands still intact, made of the same material, having the same side in shape, has always been silent. If the environmental conditions were exactly the same,

why weren't there any microfractures of the sandstone on both. Furthermore, this hypothesis cannon explain why after the restoration the block formed by the pedestal and the legs has stopped talking. Therefore,

this hypothesis leaves many questions unanswered. I don't really follow that reasoning there because so like he's ignoring the possibility that, right, the earthquake damage or whatever caused the damage is what contributed to that one particular statue making the noise, and the idea that restoration changed the load, changed the strange, changed the pressure on the rock, and that affected what

sounds it could make. Yeah, I mean, it's I don't really follow the argument either, because it's kind of like saying, well, you have these two twins. Why does one have a broken arm and the other doesn't. Well, because one twin fell out of a tree house and the other did not. One of the one of the coloss i toppled due to an earthquake, and then the argument is, of course that it it causes sort of micro fractures and necessary for this phenomenon to emerge. The other does not meet

that criteria. Yeah, I mean, so the heated air or the channels within explanation I think is a generally reasonable sounding explanation. Though I do to take Petterino side for a minute, I do wish there was a little bit more detail, like we could get more detail and exactly

how that works. Yeah, I agree, now, uh, even though I do not agree however, with many of Petorino's arguments here, I do think they're they're worth looking at because he is kind of, at the very least, he's a devil's advocate here, because not only does he have problems with

the established hypothesis, he has an alternate hypothesis. He suggests that the sound might have been the result of an artificial device UH that was positioned either in the head of the statue or kind of like stuck up in one of the nooks and crannies UH involving mirrors that conveyed the sun's rays onto a set of metal levers. Dilation due to h due to heating then would make

them hit stone keys and produce sound. And he sources this as well to an eighty nine French paper, but I was not able to really follow his um his sourcing, so perhaps this is this is based in a more elaborate argument, but for from the occult sciences, right, But basically I do I do have a lot of problems with this because it does seem like a far less elegant UH solution to say that instead of it being a naturally occurring phenomenon that has a definite start and

stop date based on damage or restoration to the statue. It instead requires a device and a plot and maintenance of the of the device over the course of at you know, two to three centuries. Now, He's not the only person to suggest that trickery was involved, right, This is actually sort of an ancient meme that maybe what the sound was was some priest class, some priesthood that was dedicated to always tricking people into thinking that the

statue made a sound. I don't think we have any way to rule that out, though Petterino gets very specific in what he thinks they might have done, right, you know, having this like thermally activated technological devices within the statue itself, another way you could you could get that kind of effect without going to quite such technological and specific links as to say there was a priest hiding behind the statue who would strike it with a with a hammer, right,

you know. Now, Now, even Peerino, he he even admits that one of the problems with this is that, uh is that if it was a device, then why would the statue need to be destroyed to produce the sound. So even he admits that that is a potential hole in the plot here, you know. And then also why would the Egyptians, presumable we have installed it to begin with. But but he also gets into another interesting area here.

Part of his criticism of the phenomenon is that he doesn't think it would have really been that much of a phenomenon that people are seemed to have gone crazy for the coloss I have memnon and this curious sound that it's making. But he argues that if it was indeed just a cracking sound emerging from stones, that this was happening elsewhere in the world and would not have been seen as a big deal. I don't know. I mean maybe so maybe this is a normal natural phenomenon.

It doesn't occur all that often, but lots of people just haven't heard it. This is the only one they've heard. I mean, how often have you heard a stone singing? That's true, I have not heard one. And if I heard one stone singing, it doesn't mean I wouldn't want to check out another one. It's still interesting. But but anyway, that's that's his argument he and he actually points to some other examples of of of of alleged a stone crackling sounds that were uh known of at various points

and written about it. Various points in human history. So he lists sounds mentioned by Charles Darwin, by Alexander von Humboldt, by members of Napoleon's Commission of Egypt, etcetera. So there are other accounts of stones making noise. That is true. Now.

Being a big Alexander von Humboldt fan, since I read Andrea Wolfe's excellent book about him a couple of years ago, I wanted to look up what the Alexander von Humboldt passages were, and so I found the passage that Petterino seems to be directly referring to is actually not Von Humboldt describing something he directly saw, but he's quoting a report from some seventeenth century explorer named Father Acuna, who I suspect is probably the Spanish missionary explorer Christo bald

Diatristan d Acuna Akunya, I think. And so here's the section from von Humboldt's personal narrative of the travels to the Equinoctal regions of America. Quote on the north of the confluence of the Kuppatuba and the Amazon says Akuna is the mountain Parawaxo, which when illumined by the sun, glows with the most beautiful colors, and thence from time to time issues a horrible noise. All right, but there's more. So von Humboldt, in another section does actually describes rocks

making noises. So maybe this is what what Petterino was obliquely referring to. So von Humboldt is narrating his journey with companions down a river in an area that I believe would now be in Venezuela. They're on the Orinoco, and von Humboldt writes the following quote, The granitic rock or granite rock on which we lay is one of those where travelers on the Orinoco have heard, from time to time towards sunrise subterraneous sounds resembling those of the organ.

The missionaries called these stones laxa stay musica. It is witchcraft, said Brujas, said our young Indian pilot who could speak Spanish. We never ourselves heard these mysterious sounds, either at car China Vieja or in the upper Orinoco. But from information given us by witnesses worthy of belief. The existence of a phenomenon that seems to depend on a certain state of the atmosphere cannot be denied. The shelves of rock

are full of very narrow and deep crevices. They are heated during the day to forty eight or fifty degrees. I several times found their temperature at the surface during the night at twenty eight degrees. It may easily be conceived that the difference of temperature between the subterranean and the external air attains its maximum about sunrise, or at that moment, which is, at the same time farthest from the period of the maximum of the heat of the

preceding day. May not these organ like sounds which are heard when a person lays his ear in contact with the stone be the effect of a current of air that shoes out through the crevices. Does not the impulse of the air against the elastic spangles of mica that

intercept the crevices contribute to modify the sounds. May we not admit that the ancient inhabitants of Egypt, in passing incessantly up and down the Nile, had made the same observation on some rock of the Thebaid, and that the music of the rocks there led to the jugglery of the priests in the statue of memnon jugglery meaning like chicanery. So I think he's he's going with the idea that there there's uh, there's a theory that the priests were

doing something nefarious there to make the sound. So picking back up with von Humbold, perhaps when quote the rosy fingered Aurora rendered her son the glorious memnon vocal unquote, the voice was that of a man hidden beneath the pedestal of the statue. But the observation of the natives of the Orinoco, which we relate, seems to explain in a natural manner what gave rise to the Egyptian belief

of a own that poured forth sounds at sunrise. Almost at the same period at which I communicated these conjectures to some of the learned in Europe, three French travelers, Jomard, Jolois and de Villiers were led to analogous ideas they heard at sunrise in a monument of granite at the center of the spot on which now stands the Palace of Karnak, a noise resembling that of a string breaking. Now this comparison is precisely that which the ancients employed

in speaking of the voice of Memnon. The French travelers thought like me that the passage of rarefied air through the fissures of a sonorous stone might have suggested to the Egyptian priests the invention of the juggleries of the Memnomium. Now, what I love about this passage is that it kind of has something for everybody, and you can you can kind of cherry pick and support any interpretation. You can say, well, von Hobald von Humbald here is talking about uh trickster

at work in him Non. That's one possibility. And he's also talking about natural phenomenon. Seems very on board with the idea that yes, uh stones could create a cracking noise just based on the natural properties of of of the heating of the stone. Yeah. I think he doesn't fully have the the exact mechanism figured out here, either, But he says, look, we're on a big slab of granite. It's making sounds in the dawn. This other place has big blocks of stone apparently making sounds at the dawn.

It could be a common natural cause. You don't necessarily have to go to the trickster priests hypothesis. Right now, Patterinho is using this as an example of Look, other people were talking about cracking stones. It's no big deal, but but it kind of is like, well, it's spent a lot of time here discussing it, and therefore it was it was clearly a matter of interest to him. Yeah, I mean, like von Humboldt, I don't encounter a lot

of spontaneously noise making stone. Yeah, I mean unless you count Mick Jagger, right who who is still creating a noise Yeah, we can't quite explain it and is one of the greatest relics of the ancient world. He is. So, so you're probably wanted, well, okay, what is what is Petorino's full hypothesis here? Well he he points out that, okay, if it was a gadget, then you have to ask, well,

who was capable of creating such a gadget? And at that time and he points to Greek mathematician and engineer heron or Hero of Alexandria, And Alexandria was a center of learning at the time, and uh and and it is is often mentioned that Hero had some ideas to what extent he actually built these out or fabricated them

as uh. You know, it is an open question, but some of his ideas did resemble what would eventually become steam technology, Like he seemed to be aware of the basic uh natural processes that would uh that were necessary for that kind of technology to ex I don't want to deny that the achievements of Hero of Alexandria were cool, but this seems kind of like those conspiracy theories that say, like something weird happened in I don't know, nineteen twenty whatever.

You know, there was this guy Tesla and he did all these inventions. Maybe he was the guy behind this thing that happened somewhere in the world. Yeah, so uh And it does get very conspiracy theorist here shortly, so Petterino says, all right, Hero is the kind of guy that or if not, the guy who could have made

the gadget. And he then he points to a few different machines that he that Hero was said to have build a fountain that trickles due to the sun's heating of a water in airfield globe and then sucks it back up again in the shade. And it was also said to produce a hissing sound. So Petterino claims that such a gadget could have been placed on the left knee of the statue and as still visible cavity uh

as in it's still visible today. But he also admits that you have to keep the thing working after, you know, for at least two centuries, so you have to expand the conspiracy theory a little bit to involve priests and guardians of the Temple of of amenof of the Third uh and they would have been the necessary keepers of the secret gadget, and he argues that they would be

the ones that would benefit from it as well. His hypothesis tics another leap by entailing the possible murder of hero yeah and his accomplices in order to keep the work a secret, because clearly Heroes the sort of guy who would want to make his wonder gadget known at some point uh and uh. He also suggested the priests might have silenced anyone who figured out the secret. And I feel like we're definitely getting into a conspiracy theory

here because the Da Vinci code. Yeah yeah. I have to ask myself at the end of it, why is it more believable to think that you had to have a like a secret cabal um that was attending to an ancient device and keeping it running for you know, two or three hundred years. Why is that a more easily digestible uh explanation? Then, oh, well, there's this temperature differential in the stone and it's causing this slight crackle.

I mean, if you want to resort to a jugglery of the priest's explanation, yet again, I think it might be a lot easier to just say, well, there was I don't know, a priest hiding somewhere in next to the statue or in the statue, I don't know, maybe there's a box or some reads or something like that you could hide in, and then they were just beating it with a hammer at dawn. That that seems to

fairly enough match what people are describing. It's possible people might not have noticed this, and that's easier than saying, well, there was a special type of thermal autonomous musical instrument designed by an ancient inventor hidden within the statue, maintained the secrecy by by this cabal of evil priests, or maybe he's not saying the evil but of trick tricksy priests. I don't know. I mean I I'd go with the hammer.

That's easier, right, right, Yeah, So, I mean, obviously we're having a little fun with this, but I do want

a stress that betterinos argument here. It I think it is worth discussing just because it does serve as a kind of Devil's advocate argument against the more established interpretation of what was going on here, and it does bring us to our our final exploration in this episode, the idea that, yeah, these devices, while I think it's unlikely that one was installed at the at the colossi of Memnon,

these gadgets are possible and uh can exist. Yeah, in fact that they are inspiring people, even in more recent years, to want to create solar thermal automata that make music right, essentially music making robots that work by sunlight. Yeah. You found a wonderful article this published in the Leonardo Music Journal in two thousand seven by Mr Duffy, the Vocal Memnon and Solar thermal Automata, And in this Duffy has just a non ice explanation of what one of these

devices would entail. Yeah, the simple version is in the description of a memnonium named after me. That is a difficult word. I'm sure I'm gonna say it wrong if I try to say it again. A memnonium quote is a self actuating system that generates music using solar energy. So this is going to be based on the theory that it was the soul, it was not some jugglery of the priests, That it was the solar thermal energy heating the stone which caused some kind of thing to

happen within it that made the breaking twang. That's right and uh and and in this article Duffy alludes again to the idea that that hero may have planned out

something that that that created sound via steam expansion. Uh And He also points to an earlier Greek scientist, to Cbs, who would have lived five to two twenty two b c. That was also an incident, possibly the first head of the Library of Alexandria, and he was credited with designing basically a solar powered mini pipe organ that was driven

by siphoning water between chambers to affect air pressure. Right. So, Duffy and the paper goes on to describe different types of solar thermal automata that could be created there's a there's a great picture of one prototype which is demonstrated at the Tank in New York City in July two thousand three, and it's described as you've got three parabolic solar concentrators, so sort of like a parabolic mirror that's going to reflect hot sunlight, and they're they're focused on

these singing tubes that are supposed to create a chord triad. And in the photo there's somebody working on positioning them with some heavy eye protection in place, because obviously these things would be a little bit dangerous. I have to say that none of the memnonium devices depicted in here really strike me as a very you know, easibly easily hidden object. They look a bit uh obnoxious in their presentation, like it would be very hard I would think to

just tuck it away in a statue. Yeah. I like the idea of memnonium as described by by the paper, but it doesn't exactly match because one of the things about the Colossi mnon is they say it happened at dawn, right, and then they don't say like, and then it happened all day after that, So you'd have to make a very special thing that It's not just like whenever their sunlight it's heating a certain device and that causes steam

to rise and whatever. It would have to be only sunlight at a very specific angle or very specific thermal differential, like right when the sun rises or something. Do you think that this uh the story of the CLASSI im noon at all inspired the scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc where the the the ammulet to illuminate the map. I didn't think about that, but it does make a sound, doesn't it When the when the sunlight goes through the amulet and it's focused down on the ground, it makes

a kind of, uh, steaming kettle kind of sound. Oh man, I am. I am way overdue for another viewing of Raiders the Lost Arc, especially if we end up doing an episode on the Ark of the Covenant. Is. Yeah, another weird conspiracy theory about ancient technology, though though a

pretty interesting one. Yeah, you know the one. The thing I love about about all these different tangents to the class, like memnon is that it does kind of come back around this azamandy as principle, right, the idea that you have some epic work of that that humanity has robbed and it just does not last. And and it applies certainly to the statues themselves, to the kingdom that they emerge from. It applies to this phenomenon that occurs with the sound, and it also applies to any kind of

device one might build to produce such a sound. I think it should give us another avenue of perspective on the idea of restorations. I mean, there's always a question when you've got some kind of landmark of ancient significance that has deteriorated, should you do a restoration on it, Should you try to make it more like it used to be, or should you just let it be as

it is? Uh? There are different schools of thought about that, right, But here we have one great example of where it looks like what happened is a restoration killed the most interesting thing about this great work of ancient art. Yeah, I think we've all seen examples of of works of

ancient or older art that once they've been restored. On one hand, it's great because now you know, conceivably we can we can learn much more about the painting or the sculpture that we can we can perhaps appreciate it in new ways. But there's also sometimes this this effect where we look at it and it looks kind of fake. It doesn't look like the same piece. It does not, it doesn't have the same aura of of of time as it used to. I personally like the idea of

replication as opposed to restoration. I mean, I'm not always opposed to restoration. There are some cases where it makes sense, especially if you need to protect an artifact from rapidly

deteriorating further. That's in some condition where it's you know, you know what I mean, But in a in a situation where it's not like that, I like the idea of leaving it as it is and it's presently deteriorated state, but then also creating in a different place a replica of what it would have been in its original state.

The Parthenon of Greece is probably a great example of this, because the Parthenon as it stands now is of course in ruins, and the history of the Parthenon is a story of destruction and looting and of course just you know, things getting old and two varying extents falling apart, but but but mostly destruction and looting. So there have been, uh, you know, efforts there have been individuals who said, will

let us restore it to its former glory. But if you if you do that, you're you're kind of erasing the past. Uh So it does seem like it's a better idea to keep things as in some cases, it seems like it's a better idea to keep things as they exist, keep the ruins as they exist. But maybe just build a replica I don't know, in Nashville, Tennessee. See how it goes. Hey, that Nashville Parthenon ain't bad. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I recommend it if you're if you

find yourself in Nashville. Personally, I think in Tennessee we should have more great monuments to human sacrifice that what arguably yes, arguably yes. All Right, So there you have it, the Colossi of Memnon. Hopefully we've we we've managed to take everyone um on a journey across millennia explaining why this uh this place, why these ruins are significant, and and why they're worth talking about here on stuff to

buy your mind. It is fascinating. I'm sorry, we we we don't have an ant here for you on exactly what caused the sound, but but it's something to ponder. I think we can leave here though fairly confident that that it's the heat model, that the heat explanation, and not some sort of ancient gadget that was placed by by a secret cultist, unless there was also a jugglery of priests to maintain such a hoax along the rocks on the shores of the Orinoco. It's a it's a

global conspiracy. That's the thing, right, all right. If you want to explore more episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, as well as blog posts and links out to our various social media accounts, be sure to check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership, that's where it all originates, and I should also throw out there, hey, if you want to help support the show, rate and review us wherever you have the ability to do that, huge thanks as always to our wonderful audio

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