The fame of Amen-hotep the Third, the grandson of the great Thothmes, rests especially upon his Twin Colossi, the grandest, if not actually the largest, that the world has ever beheld.  Imagine sitting figures, formed of a single solid block of sandstone, which have sat on for above three thousand years, mouldering gradually away under the influence of time and weather changes, yet which are still more than sixty feet high, and must originally, when they wore the tall crown of an Egyptian king, have reached very nearly the height of seventy feet!  We think a statue vast, colossal, of magnificent dimensions, if it be as much as ten or twenty feet high—­as Chantrey’s statue of Pitt, or Phidias’s chryselephantine statue of Jupiter.  What, then, must these be, which are of a size so vastly greater?  Let us hear how they impress an eye-witness of world-wide experience.  “There they sit,” says Harriet Martineau, “together, yet apart, in the midst of the plain, serene and vigilant, still keeping their untired watch over the lapse of ages and the eclipse of Europe.  I can never believe that anything else so majestic as this pair has been conceived of by the imagination of art.  Nothing certainly, even in nature, ever affected me so unspeakably; no thunderstorms in my childhood, nor any aspect of Niagara, or the great lakes of America, or the Alps, or the Desert, in my later years....  The pair, sitting alone amid the expanse of verdure, with islands of ruins behind them, grew more striking to us every day.  To-day, for the first time, we looked up to them from their base.  The impression of sublime tranquillity which they convey when seen from distant points, is confirmed by a nearer approach.  There they sit, keeping watch—­hands on knees, gazing straight forward; seeming, though so much of the face is gone, to be looking over to the monumental piles on the other side of the river, which became gorgeous temples, after these throne-seats were placed here—­the most immovable thrones that have ever been established on this earth!"[21]

[Illustration:  THE TWIN COLOSSI OF AMENHOTEP III, AT THEBES.]

The design of erecting two such colossi must be attributed to the monarch himself, and we must estimate, from the magnificence of the design, the grandeur of his thoughts and the wonderful depth of his artistic imagination; but the skill to execute, the genius to express in stone such dignity, majesty, and repose as the statues possess, belongs to the first-rate sculptor, who turned the rough blocks of stone, hewn by the masons in a distant quarry, into the glorious statues that have looked down upon the plain for so many ages.  The sculptors of Egyptian works are, in general, unknown; but, by good fortune, in this particular case, the name of the artist has remained on record, and he has himself given us an account of the feelings with which he saw them set up in the places where they still remain.  The sculptor, who bore the same name as