Amenhotep III’s Alabaster Colossi Rise Behind the Memnon Pair

Egypt put two restored alabaster statues of Amenhotep III back on their feet in Luxor on December 14, 2025. The northern figure stands 14.5 meters with its plinth and pedestal; the southern stands 13.6 meters. They sit at the third pylon of his mortuary temple on the West Bank, each about 400 tons, looking east toward the Nile.

Tourism Minister Sherif Fathy called the site a point of interest for years to come. The camera stop is real. The larger fact is that these two kings are one gate in a salvage that has been putting a vanished temple back together since 1998, on ground that still has to be pumped.

Two Alabaster Kings Now Guard the Third Pylon

The statues show the 18th Dynasty king seated, hands flat on his thighs. Mohamed Abdel-Badie, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector, said he wears the nemes headdress with the Double Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, a pleated royal kilt, a ceremonial beard and the bull’s tail. Conservators left traces of old paint: reds and yellows on the queens’ hair and collars, red on the uraeus that once sat on the northern brow.

HOW THE KING WAS SHOWN

• Queen Tiye: She stands by his right leg in a close gown, holding a floral whisk and papyrus; on the southern statue she wears a wide wig, vulture headdress and lotus fillet.
• Princess Isis: A small figure remains between the king’s legs, with the title of royal consort.
• Queen Mutemuya: His mother once stood by the left leg; that statue is lost.
• Sema-tawy: Nile gods on the throne sides bind papyrus and water lily, the sign for a united Egypt.
• Stone work: The figures were not cut from one block alone; separate pieces were slotted into a monolithic alabaster core, then set on inscribed granodiorite pedestals.

Hourig Sourouzian, the Egyptologist who has directed the Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project since 1998, said the pair once stood in commanding symmetry at this gate and formed one of the most distinctive sculptural ensembles of the reign. The alabaster came from Hatnub in Middle Egypt, a rare choice for statues of this size. Most royal colossi of the period were quartzite or sandstone. Granite blocks for the bases had to be brought back from the open-air museum at Karnak, where later builders had taken them.

Amenhotep III Built a Temple Larger Than Karnak

Kom el-Hettan, the mound behind the famous roadside statues, was the king’s “Temple of Millions of Years.” A study of its wall reliefs for the Shelby White and Leon Levy Program describes a precinct of more than 385,000 square meters, with a central axis of about 500 meters and a width of about 700 meters. In the first half of the 14th century BCE it was the largest funerary complex in Thebes, bigger than Karnak as that temple then stood.

Three mud-brick pylons ran west from the river, each fronted by colossal statues of the king. The two quartzite giants now called the Colossi of Memnon still mark the first pylon beside the modern road. They are about 18 meters tall and about 720 tons each. The new alabaster pair belongs deeper in, at the third pylon, on the way to a solar court that once held papyrus columns and lists of foreign captives.

An earthquake around 1200 BC brought the temple down. Later kings, among them Merenptah, took blocks for their own monuments. Nineteenth-century collectors lifted royal statues and Sekhmet figures that now sit in museums abroad. By the late 1990s the precinct was a field of fragments in salty water, with weeds, fire and theft eating what the river had not already taken.

Twenty-Five Years in the Salt and Silt

The German Archaeological Institute in Cairo and Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities opened the project in 1998, after the World Monuments Watch listed the temple among the world’s 100 most endangered sites. The listing came again in 2004. The institute now describes over 25 years of salvage archaeology: documentation, drainage, and the re-erection of monuments that had lain in pieces since the quake.

Work on these two alabaster colossi began in 2006, with cleaning, joins and 3D records of every fragment. Conservators Hassan Demerdash and Sayed Haggag and their teams spent the next 15 years matching pieces. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz later joined the scientific side. Funding in recent seasons has come from the American Research Center in Egypt’s Antiquities Endowment Fund, the World Monuments Fund, the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art and a grant from Dr. Marjorie Fisher.

THE ROAD BACK TO THE THIRD PYLON

1. 1998: The Egyptian-German mission starts at Kom el-Hettan after the World Monuments Watch listing.
2. 2004: A second Watch listing; drains go in to cut salt water reaching the ruins.
3. 2006: Conservation of the alabaster colossi begins; water in the peristyle and hypostyle is lowered.
4. January 2 to March 6, 2025: Crews pour concrete for new foundations, finish a 1:33 model, and clear a slope for a 300-ton crane.
5. December 14, 2025: Fathy unveils the two kings at the third pylon and presents Sourouzian with a certificate and a Sekhmet replica.

Site architect Nairy Hampikian said more than 30 Egyptian conservators were trained on the job and about 10 architects were brought into the archaeological work. Rais Mohamed Aly El-Ghassab ran the lifts. The January to March 2025 season at Mainz records the last checks before the crane moved: geologist Hafez Shamseldin on the alabaster, engineer Mohamed El-Esawy on the structural drawings, contractor Salah Abu-Aziza on the concrete that now holds the granodiorite bases.

What Else the Mission Has Already Raised

Anyone who only saw the December ceremony could think two statues were the whole yield. The German Archaeological Institute’s project file is blunter. Thousands of colossal fragments were pulled from the second and third pylons before they could be stolen or dissolved. A pair of unique alabaster colossi, it said, had been reassembled in the computer and on the ground. Other monuments were already standing.

MONUMENTS BACK ON THEIR FEET

Sourouzian’s team has also put two quartzite colossi at the Second Pylon, with Queen Tiye standing by the southern king’s right leg. In the second court, leftover splinters with no worked face went into iron gabions along the south edge. Inscribed blocks were stored. The 2025 season even added new joins on the Memnon pair itself, including pieces of the southern colossus’s right arm set out near its plinth.

As of the December 14, 2025 ceremony, more than 280 statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet had been found, documented and restored, and were still waiting to be shown. Fathy’s gift to Sourouzian, a Sekhmet replica, was a nod to that hoard. The courts that once held those figures are not a finished museum. They are a worksite that had a very public day.

Salt Water Still Runs Under the Pavement

The temple’s first disaster was an earthquake. The modern one is irrigation. Completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970 stopped the Nile’s old flood, which had soaked the eastern courts on purpose. What replaced it was worse for stone: saltwater from irrigated fields after 1970 moving through porous limestone and sandstone. The World Monuments Fund, which helped fund emergency stabilization after the 1998 Watch listing, backed a drainage system in 2004.

Dietrich Raue, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, said support from the American Research Center for the groundwater project cut the water by nearly three meters, which let crews recover monuments that had sat in silt for centuries. The Mainz season log for early 2025 found the site dry to about 3 meters below ground. The Supreme Council’s engineers then set an electric transformer beside the main pump station, a dull piece of kit that will decide whether the new foundations stay dry.

These two colossi once stood in commanding symmetry at the gate of the temple’s third pylon, forming one of the most distinctive sculptural ensembles of Amenhotep III’s reign.

Hourig Sourouzian, director, Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project

Hampikian, the site manager, told the unveiling that groundwater still rises and falls, and that those swings remain a threat to the remains. Mohamed Ismail Khaled, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the fills and mortars were chosen to match the original stone and the local climate. The alabaster is back in the air. The pumps are part of the architecture now.

Egypt’s Visitor Target Meets a Fragile Rebuild

Fathy framed the lifting as heritage policy and as a Luxor draw. He said the work was a major achievement aimed at preserving and reviving one of the most important landmarks of ancient Egyptian civilisation, and he held up the Egyptian-German partnership as a model he wants kept on other World Heritage sites. Khaled placed the statues inside a wider West Bank plan that also includes the first pylon of the Ramesseum and studies on whether Queen Nefertari’s tomb can reopen under tight limits.

THE VISITOR LOAD EGYPT IS BUILDING

• 2024 baseline: About 15.7 million international tourists, the figure officials were using when the statues went up.
• 2025 record: 19 million arrivals, a 21 percent rise, according to the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
• 2026 so far: 12.8 million from January through September, with Fathy expecting about 20 million by year-end.
• Longer target: 30 million a year, still the government’s stated aim for the next phase of growth.

Those figures are national, not a gate count at Kom el-Hettan. Most West Bank itineraries still climax at the two quartzite Memnon statues by the asphalt, then move on to Medinet Habu or the Valley of the Kings. The new alabaster pair sits further in, on a precinct that was a flooded field a generation ago. Cameras on the road have not moved with them. The name “Colossi of Memnon” still swallows everything behind it, including two kings who are not those colossi and never were.

Sourouzian’s own brief for the project was to save the last remains of a once-prestigious temple. Fathy’s brief is a point of interest that can take years of traffic. Both can be true in one afternoon of speeches. They pull the ground in different directions. Alabaster is softer than the quartzite of the roadside pair. The third pylon now carries 400-ton seated figures on new concrete and old granodiorite, over a water table that has to be held down with pumps and a transformer. The ministry wants 30 million people in the country. This temple is one of the places those people will be told to walk.

Sourouzian is still presenting the sculpture from this site; she is due to speak on the temple’s royal portraiture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on December 5, 2026. More than 280 Sekhmet statues, as of the Luxor ceremony, still waited for a court to receive them. The two kings face the river again. The water under their pedestals is a managed fact, not a solved one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are the new Amenhotep III statues the Colossi of Memnon?

No. The Colossi of Memnon are the two quartzite seated statues, about 18 meters tall and about 720 tons each, that still stand at the first pylon beside the modern road; Greeks named them for the hero Memnon, and the northern one cracked in 27 BC and was patched in the Roman period. The 2025 pair is Egyptian alabaster, 14.5 meters and 13.6 meters, and stands at the third pylon of the same temple.

How tall are the restored alabaster statues in Luxor?

The northern colossus is 14.5 meters including its alabaster plinth and granodiorite pedestal; the southern is 13.6 meters; each is about 400 tons. Early finds had pointed to a taller original, around 18 meters, before the earthquake and later stone-robbing took the missing mass.

Who led the Amenhotep III temple restoration in Luxor?

Hourig Sourouzian has directed the Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project since 1998 under the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, with Kathrin Gabler as co-director in recent Mainz seasons and Nairy Hampikian as site manager. The mission also works with Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and has had scientific input from the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.

Why did Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple collapse?

A heavy earthquake around 1200 BC toppled the pylons and statues; older guides often blamed a quake in 27 BC, which is now tied to later damage on the Memnon pair rather than to the temple’s fall. After the collapse, the precinct became a quarry, and geoarchaeology has shown the building began on a high wadi fan that later sank under fast Nile silt, so flood and salt finished what the quake began.

Where did the alabaster for the Luxor colossi come from?

The stone was quarried at Hatnub in Middle Egypt, and the granodiorite pedestals were inscribed with the temple’s name and that source. Sourouzian has called the pair the only preserved colossi of this size in that stone, which is why the Hatnub blocks were documented, printed in 3D and matched for 15 years before a 300-ton crane lifted them in 2025.