[325] Diodorus, i. 46.
[326] These are the figures given by Mariette (Itinéraire de la Haute-Égypte, p. 135). Other authorities give 340 feet by 177. Diodorus ascribed to the temple of which he spoke a height of 45 cubits (or 69 feet 3 inches). This is slightly below the true height. We may here quote the terms in which Champollion describes the impression which a first sight of these ruins made upon him: "Finally I went to the palace, or rather to the town of palaces, at Karnak. There all the magnificence of the Pharaohs is collected; there the greatest artistic conceptions formed and realised by mankind are to be seen. All that I had seen at Thebes, all that I had enthusiastically admired on the left bank of the river, sunk into insignificance before the gigantic structures among which I found myself. I shall not attempt to describe what I saw. If my expressions were to convey but a thousandth part of what I felt, a thousandth part of all that might with truth be said of such objects, if I succeeded in tracing but a faint sketch, in the dimmest colours, of the marvels of Karnak, I should be taken, at least for an enthusiast, perhaps for a madman. I shall content myself with saying that no people, either ancient or modern, have had a national architecture at once so sublime in scale, so grand in expression, and so free from littleness as that of the ancient Egyptians." (Lettres d'Égypte, pp. 79, 80.)
[327] Including a postern of comparatively small dimensions, there are five doorways to the hypostyle hall.—Ed.
[328] A plan of the successive accretions is given in plates 6 and 7 of Mariette's work. The different periods and their work are shown by changes of tint. The same information is given in another form in pages 36 and 37 of the text. The complete title of the work is as follows: Karnak, Étude topographique et archéologique, avec un Appendice comprenant les principaux Textes hiéroglyphigues. Plates in folio; text in a 4to. of 88 pages (1875).
[329] In presence of this double range of superb columns one is tempted to look upon them as the beginning of a hypostyle hall which was never finished, to suppose that a great central nave was constructed, and that, by force of circumstances unknown, the aisles were never begun, and that the builders contented themselves by inclosing and preserving their work as far as it had gone.
[330] Diodorus, i. 47-49.
[331] Strabo, xvii. i. 42. In another passage (xvii. i. 46) he seems to place the Memnonium close to the two famous colossi. He would, therefore, seem rather to have had in view an "Amenophium," the remains of which have been discovered in the immediate neighbourhood of the two colossi. The French savants suspected this to be the case, but they often defer to the opinions of their immediate predecessors among Egyptian travellers. (Description générale de Thèbes, section iii.)
[332] This pylon stands in the foreground of our view (Fig. 220). The face which is here shown was formerly covered—as we may judge from the parts which remain—with pictures of battles; and that we might not have to actually invent scenes of combat for our restoration, we have borrowed the ornamentation of the first pylon of the Temple of Khons. The scale of our cut is too small, however, to show any details.
[333] Lepsius, Denkmæler, part i. plates 88 and 89. The engineers of the Institut d'Égypte fell into an error in speaking of this hall. They failed to notice that it was smaller than the second court, and they accordingly gave it sixty columns. (Description générale de Thebes, vol. i. p. 132.)
[334] See Ebers, Ægypten, vol. ii. pp. 309 et seq.