He was followed by Amenophis III., under whose long and glorious reign the temple of Luqsor was built. He is represented by the two giant colossi, near Medînet Habu, pushed far forward into the fertile plain, once standing at the gate of a mighty temple, the remains of which, however, principally lie buried under the harvests of the annually rising soil of the valley. Perhaps a roadway, like that to the north, led hence through the valley to the opposite Luqsor. The north-eastern of the two colossi was the celebrated vocal statue, to which the Greeks attached the pleasant legend of the handsome Memnon, who greeted his mother Aurora every morn at sunrise, while she, because of his early hero-death, watered him with her dewy tears. This mythos, as Letronne has proved, was formed at a very late period; as the peculiar phenomena of the trembling tone, the consequence of the cracking of little particles by the sudden warming of the cold stone, took its rise when the statue, already cracked, was more shattered by an earthquake in the year 27 B.C. The occurrence of cracking and sounding stones in the desert and in great fields of ruins is not unfrequent in Egypt; the nature of the flint conglomerate of which the statue is composed is particularly inclined to it, as the innumerable cracks, great and small, which pass in every direction through those portions of the statue inscribed at the Greek period, at that time therefore unharmed, show. It is also remarkable how many of the cracked and loose pieces sound bell-like on being struck, while others remain dead and toneless, according as their respective positions make them more or less damped. The numerous Greek and Roman inscriptions which are graven on the statue, and announce the visit of foreigners, particularly if they had been so fortunate as to hear the morning greeting, begin first under Nero, and only go down to the time of Septimius Severus, to whom is due the restoration of the originally monolithic statue. Since this re-erection of the upper portion in single block, the phenomenon of the sounding stone appears to have become less frequent and less apparent, if had not quite stopped. The mutation of the name of the still remembered Amenophis (as the inscriptions testify) into Memnon seems to have been principally induced by the name of this western side of Thebes, Memnonia, which the Greeks seem to have explained to themselves as “Palaces of Memnon,” while the name, hieroglyphically _mennu_, signified “palaces” in general. At the present day the statues are, called Shama and Tama by the Arabs, or together the Sanamât (not Salamât), _i. e._ “the idols.”[95]