[203] Rosell. _loc. cit._ 3, 1, 216. The Greeks regarded the northern colossus as the statue of Memnon. The ruins of this temple, and other buildings on the west bank of the Nile, were called by them "Memnoneia."--Diod. 1, 47; Strabo, pp. 813, 816. The name is strictly limited to the temples and palaces on the west bank. Yet even the fortress of Susa is called "the Memnonia."--Herod. 5, 53, 7, 151; Strabo, p. 728; Diod. 2, 22; Paus. 10, 31. The name as applied to the Egyptian monuments may be a corruption of Amenophis, so that the name of the buildings of Amenophis has given the analogy for other similar structures. Still, it is more probable that the connection of these buildings with the divinity of the under world, and the death of Osiris, to which the death of Memnon was compared, is at the root of this nomenclature of the Greeks. The story of the Ethiopian Memnon, the son of the Morning, _i.e._ of the East, who came to aid the Trojans and found an early death before Troy, is known to the Odyssey (11, 522, 4, 187), the Homeric hymns ("In Ven." 219-239) and the Theogony (l. 984), and was treated in detail by Arktinus of Miletus about 750 B.C. In Homer's view the Ethiopians dwell in the far East, at the rising of the sun, beyond the Amazons, whose abode was on the Thermodon. Hence the ancient Susa, far in the East, the subsequent capital of the Achæmenids, might have been the dwelling of the son of the East. When it was known that the Ethiopians inhabited the Upper Nile, and the name Memnon was found in Egypt, the Greeks, after the time of Herodotus, began to search for the Homeric Ethiopians and Memnon, in and above Egypt. That the name is given to the northern colossus only is due to the following reasons. In the year 27 B.C. an earthquake broke this northern colossus and threw the upper parts to the ground. Then the pedestal and trunk occasionally gave forth a metallic sound at sunrise.--Tac. "Annal." 2, 61. This, in the poetic minds of the Greeks, was the greeting of the son to his divine mother, the Morning, while she in her sorrow for the early death of her son moistened the statue every morning with tears of dew. Greek inscriptions on the pedestal from the time of Nero give the names of witnesses who had heard the sound. Pausanias, who was of this date, tells us, _loc. cit._--"At Thebes, in Egypt, is the sounding statue of a seated man, whom most authorities call Memnon, and say that he forced his way from Ethiopia to Egypt and Susa. The inhabitants of Thebes, however, deny that it is Memnon. They regard it as the statue of Phamenoph, a native Egyptian." Ph-Amenoph is Amenophis with the Egyptian article. The sounding statue was long regarded as a fable, until the _savans_ of the French expedition, in the early morning, when the hot sunbeams followed on the cool of the night, as is usual in the climate of Africa, perceived in the great Egyptian buildings a small whispering,