THE SINGING STATUES OF EGYPT

Nearly 2,000 years ago, in 130AD, the Roman emperor Hadrian and his entourage arrived in the Egyptian city of Thebes, now called Luxor. Hadrian was an enthusiastic traveller, says Mary Beard, and on this occasion he wanted to visit one of the wonders of ancient Egypt: ‘Perhaps the greatest five-star tourist attraction in the whole of the ancient world.’

Even in Hadrian’s day, this pair of huge statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, around 65ft high and standing guard outside his tomb, were 1,500 years old, although the Romans wrongly thought they depicted the Ethiopian king Memnon, and they’re still called the Colossi of Memnon. The big attraction for Roman tourists was that, if you were lucky and got there early in the morning, one of the statues would sing – apparently it sounded like a lyre with a broken string. It didn’t happen every morning but it was a good omen if Memnon sang for you.

The sound was probably caused by dew evaporating inside the porous rock and hasn’t been reliably heard since reconstruction in the 2nd century.

‘Ancient tourists thought it fun to carve their reactions onto the statue’s leg, and one of Hadrian’s party, a ladyin-waiting named Julia Balbilla, recorded hers in four poems of rather dreadful Greek verse,’ says Mary. On their second day, Julia announces, the statue sang. ‘I do not think this statue of yours will be destroyed,’ she wrote. And it hasn’t been. ‘It’s amazing that Hadrian’s encounter is recorded via a piece of vandalism,’ says Mary.