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Memnon is not the Egyptian king whose musical statue was famous (cf. Paus. i. 42. 3; Frazer, ii. 530; Tac. Ann. ii. 61), but the king of Ethiopia, son of Aurora, who came to help Priam (Od. iv. 188; xi. 522); cf. ‘the Memnonian palace’, v. 53; ‘Memnonian Susa’, v. 54. 2; ‘Memnon's road’ (Paus. x. 31. 7, though Frazer, ad loc., argues this was not H.'s ‘Royal Road’). The original Memnon is identified by Robertson Smith with Adonis, a god ‘first dead and then alive’ (cf. E. H. R., 1887, p. 307), and became the centre of many strange myths; for the birds at his grave cf. Ael. H. A. v. 1 and Frazer, Paus. v. 387. The stories of ‘Memnon’ belong to a later stage of mythology, when men placed the Homeric ‘Aethiopians’ in Africa; but the name is Egyptian. If, as is possible, the myth of Memnon is a reflection of a great Anatolian ‘Hittite’ empire, the view rejected by H. was correct. The statue at Karabel certainly resembles those at Boghaz Keui and elsewhere; it probably is that of the Hittite war-god. The great Egyptologist, Lepsius, however, like H., thought the figure Egyptian. Ramsay (H. G. of A. M., p. 60) thinks H.'s topographical details are impossible, and considers that he never went ‘more than a few miles from the coast’ (of Asia Minor), and so had never seen the monument he here describes; H. had been told there were three roads to Sardis, viz. from Phocaea, from ‘the Ephesian territory’, and from Smyrna, and that two of them were marked by monuments, i. e. the Karabel relief and the ‘Niobe’; these three roads H. confuses and makes into two. This criticism of Ramsay's is not usually accepted; but even if H. has confused the roads, it does not follow that he had never traversed them. If Ramsay be right that H. never left the coast, the historian would be convicted of a serious suggestio falsi; though he does not say distinctly that he had seen the Ionian monuments, he certainly implies that he had done so and that he had traversed the roads. The whole chapter is most interesting as showing: (1) The care of H. to use archaeological evidence; (2) his mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy in the use of it; the latter is easily explicable, considering the difficulties under which his observations were conducted; the figures are high up above the road; (3) his ignorance of history before the seventh century. He has no idea of the limitations of Egyptian power, or of the existence of great Anatolian powers in the past.
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