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The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.57.1.0183

1528-4212

Thomas D. Frazel,

Ancient Near East History

In this elegant and compelling study, Patricia A. Rosenmeyer examines sixty-one Greek and forty-five Latin inscriptions, along with a bilingual one (Greek–Latin), honoring the marvelous epiphanies of a mythical hero from the Trojan War, Memnon. These 107 inscriptions (eleven of which were signed by women) were carved on a gigantic quartzite statue in Egypt over a span of nearly 200 years (c. AD 14–205). The marvel was that Memnon revealed himself, only occasionally, by emitting a weird, unearthly sound from his statue. The fortunate men and women who heard it used writing to record their ephemeral, unrecordable encounter with the divine. The colossal statue (some sixty feet high) upon which they inscribed, however, was originally one of a pair representing the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep III (reigned 1417–1379 BC) and stood at the entrance to his temple–tomb complex in the Theban Necropolis, across from the modern city of Luxor. It was severely damaged by an earthquake in 27 or 26 BC: the top half collapsed and the lower half cracked. After that break, the statue began to produce a high-pitched sound early in the morning, apparently caused, scientists now say, by the heat of the sun warming the stone base. At some unknown point, the statue then came to be regarded not as Amenhotep, but as Memnon, a son of the goddess Eos (Dawn). When the upper half was restored in the late second or early third centuries AD, the statue fell silent again and has remained so to this day. The statue saw the reign and fall of the pharaohs, the conquest and rule of Egypt by Macedonian generals of Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, (323–30 BC), and, finally, domination by Rome after the death of Cleopatra (30 BC). In that yawing chronological gap of some 1,400 years lies a tale that Rosenmeyer deftly tells of cultural rupture and reappropriation on a colossal scale. She proposes that because the statue was an object imbued with cultural memory, the “language of its ruins” still speaks to us of the social and cultural worlds of the various writers. Thus, she is focused not on a philological reading of the inscriptions, but on the manifold ways in which the writers themselves were negotiating distances and dislocations: Greeks trying to articulate what Greekness meant under the Roman empire, for example, or men using the ancient Homeric poems (Chapter 4) and women, the poems of Sappho (Chapter 5), to express their own encounter with the divine in the voice of Memnon. Memnon even reechoed in the nineteenth century, as the scholarly rediscovery of ancient Egypt stimulated a host of Romantic artists to give him a voice yet again—sometimes as Ozymandias, sometimes as Memnon—a process that Rosenmeyer herself now records in writing (Chapter 6). For its clarity of exposition and intriguing content, this book can be read by anyone in the humanities, religious studies, or social sciences with pleasure and profit.Rosenmeyer explores the rich social and cultural world revealed by the inscriptions. To be sure, the inscriptions reveal priceless chronological information: very many of them are signed, dated, and even include the writer's military or governmental rank. In their critical edition, the brothers, André and Etienne Bernand, painstakingly analyzed such data and used them to date the majority of the inscriptions (Les inscriptions grecques et latines du colosse de Memnon. Paris: Institut français d'archéologie orientale, 1960). The Bernands' work serves as the solid base for Rosenmeyer's study. With admirable methodological rigor, she now asks of the inscriptions such questions as whether the writers saw themselves as religious pilgrims or as tourists or whether Memnon was reckoned to be a divine oracle and her discussions here fall squarely within contemporary scholarship on social performance and cultural memory (Chapter 1) and sacred tourism (Chapter 2). Of particular interest are the various ways that the inscribers viewed Memnon and the manifold ways in which they articulated their relationships to him (Chapter 3). Here, Rosenmeyer identifies apostrophe and personification (what she terms prosopopeia) as critical gestures in the writers' repertoire. She also shows that the writers faced a welter of myths about Memnon. He falls in between the end of the Iliad and the start of the Odyssey: there are many traditions, say, that Achilles killed Memnon at Troy, but this tale is not told in those two epics. The Odyssey refers to Memnon as the “son of Eos” (Odyssey 4.188) and uses the common, formulaic epithet, “brilliant,” to describe him (Odyssey 11.522). Hesiod also mentions the Eos parentage, but further calls him “king of the Ethiopians,” not Egyptians (Theogony 985). Stories gradually developed to fit the Egyptian statue into the standard Greek mythic matrix: Eos lamented the death of her son, say, and stole away his corpse to Egypt, only to mourn (or greet) him every morning; Ethiopia was the source of the Nile and thus connected the statue with Memnon the Ethiopian king; and so forth. Rosenmeyer is a sure and steady guide through these complex adaptations and developments and shows how different writers emphasized different aspects and characteristics of the Memnon myth (Chapters 4–5).At its heart, Rosenmeyer's study is ultimately a celebration of the remarkable intellectual and cultural achievements of the nineteenth century and of our enduring debt to them. The scientific study of languages (ancient and modern), of history, and of religion began, in the forms that we know them today, then and, right alongside this systematic approach to evidence, flourished Romantic poetry and art that was itself, very often, inspired and informed by it. Few objects reveal this rich fertilization as well as the Memnon colossus. Rosenmeyer notes that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in his 1840 poem, “A Fragment [Where Is the Giant of the Sun],” asks where are the past glories of “mysterious Egypt” now: “Thy Memnon when his peaceful lips are kissed/ With earliest rays, that from his mother's eyes/ Flow over the Arabian bay, no more/ Breathes low into the charmed ears of morn/ Clear melody …” Rosenmeyer's lucid study reminds us of how close and yet how far we are to Tennyson: we are able to refer to the statue now as “Amenhotep/Memnon” only because of the years of intense, collective labor by countless scholars that led to, say, the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the systematic reconstruction of Egyptian history. Yet, as we read The Language of Ruins, we, paradoxically, listen again to the selfsame “Clear melody” of Memnon that so enchanted Tennyson.