Revisiting: Egypt

This is a detail of one of the lower legs of one of the 3400 year-old Colossi of Memnon (the farther of the two above). It shows graffiti from several millenia. Some of the writing is in ancient Greek. For the Greeks, these giant statues were already themselves ancient, over a thousand years old. Other inscriptions are in Latin; for Romans of the Imperial period the statues were fifteen-hundred years old. In one Latin inscription a poetess who was accompanying the entourage of the Emperor Hadrian carved a poem in the sandstone flanks of the statues. At the left there is evidence of very recent graffiti, only from the 19th century.