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Location
The memorial temple of Amenhotep III was built during the life of the pharaoh in Uaset (Thebes) between 1390 and 1353 BC. e., very close to the shore of the now disappeared sleeve of the Nile. This was one of the reasons for its rapid destruction.
When Neil flooded everything around the hill, the temple symbolized the place of "the emergence of the world from the pristine waters of creation" every time, since according to the dominant cosmogony in the country, the earth was formed from a hill that rose from the water.
Amenhotep III wanted to be revered as a god on earth, not just in the afterlife.
Architect: deified after the death of Amenhotep, son of Hapu
The construction of the memorial church of Amenhotep III was led by the royal architect and manager of the works Amenhotep, son of Hapu.
After his death, he began to be revered for his teachings and as a philosopher. He was also revered as a healer and eventually began to worship him as a god of healing, like his predecessor Imhotep (Amenhotep and Imhotep are one of the few Egyptians of non-royal blood who were deified after death, and until the 21st century it was believed that they were the only commoners to achieve such a status).
Several statues depicting him in his youth and adulthood have survived to this day. He was a deified man, so he was depicted only in human appearance.
Initially, the cult of Amenhotep, the son of Hapu, was distributed only in Uaset, where during his lifetime a funeral temple was built next to the temple of Amenhotep III. It was an exceptional privilege, since it was the only private cult temple built among the royal monuments in this region.
He continued to be worshipped for at least three centuries after his death, as evidenced by the inscription of the 26th dynasty on a statue dedicated to Amenhotep by the pharaoh's daughter. During the Ptolemaic era, his cult experienced a revival, leading to chapels dedicated to him at the Hathor Temple in Deir el-Medina and the Hatshepsut Burial Temple in Deir el-Bahari. He was erected statues in the temple of Amun in Karnak, and was considered a mediator between the people and the god Amon.
Pylons, courtyards, sculptures
Colossus Memnon
The surviving figures of Amenhotep III (the so-called Colossus Memnon) were located in front of the first pylon.
The immediate manufacture of the statues was controlled by the head of the Ming wayatels, and the installation, like the construction of the entire temple, was led by Amenhotep, son of Hapu.
According to the inscription carved on the statue of the latter in Karnak (stored in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo), stone blocks for sculptures had 40 elbows in length (the "royal" elbow in ancient Egypt was 52.3 cm) and were brought to Uaset along the Nile on specially built ships for this.
The statues are made of solid blocks of very hard brown-red quartzite, mined almost 700 km north of Uaset in the Gebel Gebel-el-Akhmar quarries on the eastern (right) bank of the Nile (in the vicinity of modern Cairo). The creator of these quarries was also previously Amenhotep, son of Hapu.
The distance between the colossus is about 17 m. The height of the "northern" is 14.76 m, the "southern" is 13.97 m; rectangular quartzite pedestals with sides of about 10.5 × 5.4 m have a height of 3.3-4.4 m and 3.6-4.0 m, respectively.
Together with the now lost, presumably three-meter, double crowns of the united Upper and Lower Egypt (millet), each statue could rise by more than 21 m. The mass of each colossus was approximately 720 tons, and with a pedestal - about 750 tons.
Amenhotep III is depicted sitting on a cubic throne in a canonical pose with hands on his knees, dressed in a pleated loincloth and a royal headscarf of nemes. At his feet with his back to the throne and flush with the throne (height about 5 m), two standing figures of women in long tight-fitting dresses and large wigs are carved from the same monolith: his wife Tia to the right of the pharaoh, and his mother Mutemuya to the left. Between the feet of each colossus was originally a third, still unidentified female figure (presumably one of the daughters of Amenhotep III, most likely the eldest daughter-wife Satamon, along with her mother Tia, who received a separate funeral hall with a column in the tomb of Amenhotep III WV 22 in the Valley of the Kings). Both figures of the "princess" (on the sides at the feet of the pharaoh) are destroyed, but even in the drawings of Europeans who visited the monument in the 18th and 19th centuries, they are shown intact. According to the engineers of the Egyptian expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte 1798-1801. J.-B. P. Jollois and R. E. de Villiers du Terrage, these figures were no higher than human growth.
On the side faces of the trons are carved paired reliefs of androgynous images of the god Neil Hapi, on both sides tightening the stems of the papyrus and lotus on the symbol Sema-Taui.
The colossus and their pedestals have partially lost hieroglyphic inscriptions, including the throne and personal names of the pharaoh in cartouches and the explanation that he erected these great stone statues as a monument to his father, the god Amon.
According to ancient authors, as a result of the earthquake (Strabo. Geography. XVII. 1. 46), which occurred, according to the "Chronicle" of Eusebius of Caesarea, around 27 BC. e., the upper half of the "northern" colossus "from the head to the middle of the body" broke off and crashed (Pausanias. Description of Hellas. I. 42. 3; at the same time, Pausanias wrote that the statue was ordered to be destroyed by the Persian king Cambyses II, who conquered Egypt in the last quarter of the VI century. BC e.).
The Greeks gave the destroyed "singing" from the movement of air in the cracks of the colossus the name Memnon in honor of the hero who fell at the hand of Achilles in the Trojan War - the mythical king of Ethiopia, believing that so, coming to life in the morning, he plaintively appeals to his mother - the goddess of dawn Eos.
Around 200, Emperor Septimius Severus, who personally saw and heard the statue, ordered the restoration of its upper part, for which specially processed 10-ton blocks of quartzite from quarries near Edfu or Aswan were used. After this repair (unfinished, possibly due to the death of the emperor), the "singing Memnon" stopped making any sounds.
The belonging of the colossus to Amenhotep III was established by J.-F. Champollion, as part of the Franco-Tuscan expedition in 1829, was the first to read hieroglyphs on statues with the name and name of the pharaoh.
Next to the second pylon, another Amenhotep III colossus of monolithic quartzite was discovered.
In the southern part of the peristyle Solnechny Dvor, behind the third pylon, there were sphinxes bought by Russia in 1832 (see St. Petersburg), and in the northern part there were sphinxes of Pharaoh's wife Teye.
On the north side, brown quartzite statues from Lower Egypt were installed, and on the south side, red granite statues from Aswan in Upper Egypt, which demonstrated the desire of Amenhotep III for semataui (unification) of both lands.
The courtyard was followed by a hypostyle, or covered, column hall. Between the painted and gold-upholstered columns in the form of papyrus bundles stood countless statues of the goddess Sekhmet, guarding the passage to the holy of holies. There were statues of deities and, probably, Amenhotep III himself.
The sanctuary has not yet been excavated, and somewhere below, under a thick layer of silt and sand, is the main mystery of the temple: it is not yet known whose statue stood there.
Destruction of the temple
The memorial temple of Amenhotep III was completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1200 BC. e., by the spills of the Nile and the pharaoh of the XIX dynasty Merneptah, who let his stones build his own sanctuary. Stone blocks from the temple of Amenhotep III went to the construction of the temple of Merneptah in Medinet Abu and the temple of Khonsu in Karnak.
About 700 statues of the goddess Sekhmet ended up in the temple of Mut (one of the four key ancient temples that form the Karnak temple complex, see Luxor), and a giant scarab on the shores of the holy lake of the temple of Amon in Karnak.
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Dozens of restored statues from the memorial temple of Amenhotep III for 2022 are stored in the Luxor Museum.
Rebuilding the ruins of the temple
At the beginning of the 21st century, under the leadership of Egyptologist Hurik Suruzyan, two quartzite giants (14.5 and 13.6 m) depicting the pharaoh were restored as part of the Memnon Colossus and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project. The work lasted almost 20 years and was completed in December 2025. The sculptures were collected from many fragments found at the site, and the missing blocks for the bases were returned from the temples of Karnak.
Two more colossal alabaster statues of Amenhotep III (about 14 m) were restored and returned to their places at the third pylon of the temple also in December 2025.
During the project, about 280 statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet were found, documented and restored. They are preparing for display in the colonnade of the temple.
For 2022, some sections of the complex were constantly under water. It was in the water that new finds were made: two large sphinxes (approximately eight meters high) were almost completely immersed in it near the third pylon. Apparently, they depicted the pharaoh himself: human heads are equipped with a royal beard and nemesis - a striped headdress (a headscarf tied in a special way), which only the pharaohs could wear. On the necks of the sphinxes, the sculptors depicted wide collars - also a distinctive feature of the ritual royal dress.
On the fragment, which was most likely once part of the chest of the sphinx, after clearing, inscriptions became visible. One of them mentions the "beloved Amon-Ra" - this is how the name of Amenhotep stands for. Other pieces of the body and paws were also safely removed from the water, work is underway to preserve them.
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