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The northern colossus, the one that sang at dawn after an earthquake broke it. A Roman repair around AD 199 silenced it for good.

Two seated colossi of Amenhotep III stood on the Theban plain for thirteen centuries before anyone recorded them making a noise. Then an earthquake around 27 BC brought down the upper half of the northern one, and shortly afterward, at sunrise, the wreck began to sing. The sound was described as a lyre string snapping, or a struck bronze, or a human voice, and it happened in the first hour after dawn, not every day, which was enough to convince the Greek-speaking world that the statue was Memnon, the Ethiopian hero killed at Troy, greeting his mother Eos, the dawn, who wept for him in dew. Egypt was a Roman province and the colossus became its greatest attraction. Strabo came and heard it and was carefully agnostic about the source. Hadrian came in AD 130 with the empress Sabina and a court poet named Julia Balbilla, waited, heard nothing on the first morning, and heard it on the second, whereupon Balbilla carved four Greek poems on the statue's left foot recording the visit. She was not alone. Around a hundred inscriptions survive on the legs and base, tourists writing that they came and heard, or came and did not, dated by consulship, the ancient world's visitor book. The physical explanation is dull and probably right: the morning sun warming dew trapped in the porous cracked stone, evaporation forcing air through the fissures, and the whole ruin acting as a very large whistle. It stopped speaking sometime around AD 199, and the tradition blames Septimius Severus, who visited hoping to hear the oracle, was disappointed, and had the broken statue repaired with sandstone blocks as an act of piety. The repair is still visible in the upper courses. It has not made a sound since. David Roberts painted the pair in 1838 with the Nile flood around their knees, which is how they stood for part of every year before the dams: two seated kings up to their calves in the inundation, facing east, waiting for a sunrise they no longer answer. The temple they once guarded is gone; they were its gateposts.