Act 2: An Aegean Affair To Remember: 14th Century BC

Towering more than sixty feet high and destined to stand guard for the next thirty-four hundred years, even as the mortuary temple that stood behind them was looted for its magnificent stone blocks and slowly crumbled into dust, the two huge statues standing at the entrance to Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple at Kom el-Hetan were, and still are, erroneously called the Colossi of Memnon as a result of a mistaken identification with Memnon, a mythological Ethiopian prince killed at Troy by Achilles.

Each statue depicts a seated Amenhotep III, pharaoh of Egypt from 1391 to 1353 BC. In part because of this erroneous identification, the Colossi were already famous two thousand years ago, visited by ancient Greek and Roman tourists familiar with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, who carved graffiti on the legs. One of the Colossi— after being damaged by an earthquake in the first century BC— was known for giving off an eerie whistling sound at dawn, as the stone contracted and expanded with the cold of night and heat of day. Unfortunately for the ancient tourist trade, restoration work during the Roman period in the second century AD finally put an end to the daily “cries of the god.”1

However, fascinating as they are, it is not the two Colossi that are critical to our story of important events in the fourteenth century BC, but rather the fifth of five statue bases standing in a north–south row within the boundaries of where the mortuary temple once stood. The temple was located on the west bank of the Nile, near what is now known as the Valley of the Kings, across from the modern city of Luxor. The five bases each held a larger-than-life-sized statue of the king, although they were not nearly as tall as the Colossi placed at the entrance to the temple. The court in which they stood contained almost forty such statues and bases in all.

THE AEGEAN LIST OF AMENHOTEP III

Each of the five bases, as well as many of the others, is inscribed with a series of topographical names carved into the stone within what the Egyptians called a “fortified oval”—an elongated oval carved standing upright, with a series of small protrusions all along its perimeter.

This was meant to depict a fortified city, complete with defensive towers (hence the protrusions). Each fortified oval was placed on, or rather replaced, the lower body of a bound prisoner, portrayed with his arms behind his back and bound together at the elbow, sometimes with a rope tied around his neck attaching him to other prisoners in front of and behind him. This was a traditional New Kingdom Egyptian method of representing foreign cities and countries; even if the Egyptians didn’t actually control these foreign places or were not even close to conquering them, they still wrote the names within such “fortified ovals” as an artistic and political convention, perhaps as symbolic domination.

These statue bases had a list of geographical names, as an “Aegean List”, showing the world known to during Amenhotep III’s time, in the early fourteenth century BC.

The list has names never before mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions.

They were the names of cities and places located to the west of Egypt—strange names, such as Mycenae, Nauplion, Knossos, Kydonia, and Kythera, written on the left front and left side of the base, and with two more names written separately on the right front side of the base, as if they were titles placed at the head of the list: Keftiu and Tanaja.

What was the meaning of this list and their names?

What modern tourists to the site now see (usually as they are passing by the ruins in an air-conditioned bus on their way to the nearby Valley of the Kings) are the statue bases, and the statues upon them, being reassembled once again, to stand beneath the sun-drenched skies for the first time in more than three thousand years. In 1998, a multinational team led by Egyptologist Hourig Sourouzian and her husband Rainer Stadelmann, the former director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, reopened the excavations at Kom el-Hetan. They have been excavating there every year since and have recovered the fragments of the destroyed Aegean List statue base, as well as those of its neighbors. They are now in the process of reconstructing and restoring them. The eight hundred pieces from the Aegean List alone took more than five years to piece together.2

Only two of the names were familiar:

1. Keftiu or Crete
2. Tanaja or mainland Greece

The two names ‘Amnisa and Kunusa look uncomfortably like Amniso(s) andKnossos, famous ancient settlements on the north coast of Crete.