As to the cutting of inscriptions on the statue, it is said that it is probable that they thought they could not do a greater honor to the statue than to cut on it the testimonies of so many persons that heard the sound…The common people have the weakness to imagine that inscriptions discover treasures.
-Richard Pococke, Bishop in the Church of Ireland, Description of the East and Some Other Countries, 1743
I, Tiberius Julius Lupus, Prefect of Egypt, heard Memnon at the 1st Hour. I, Sextus Licinius Pudens, Centurion of the 22nd Legion, on the 11th Day before the Kalends of January, in the 3rd Year of the Emperor Domitian, heard Memnon. I, Sabinius Fuscus, Prefect of the 1st Mounted Spanish Cohort, heard Memnon twice on the 7th Day before the Ides of March, in the 3rd Year of the Emperor Domitian Augustus, at the 2nd Hour.
-Graffiti carved on the legs and torso of the Colossus of Memnon, Thebes
Richard Pococke, “a pioneer of Homeric topography” his biographer called him, mapped and transcribed some of the 107 graffiti tags incised by Greek and Roman tourists on the legs of the northern-most Colossus of Memnon in Thebes, which was said to sing when the heat of the dawn sun warmed the stone and expanded its fissures to make a high pitched humming sound “like the breaking of a string of a harp when it is wound”, in a moment of what some might call harmonic convergence.
His book has an illustration plate showing the Colossus lettered like a comic book. Some scholars speculate that the many texts’ recurring grammatical errors indicate there were Egyptian carvers on site with poor Greek and Latin who for a fee would chisel the inscriptions so the foreign visitors (or maybe it was they who gave ungrammatical dictation) would not have to climb the statue.
I wonder what that rare literate camel drover would have made of the letter I wrote on KhairAllah’s behalf and left with a passing herdsman midway on the trail, explaining that a lost camel of a certain color with a certain brand belonged to so-and-so and should be returned to his friend so-and-so, terribly spelled except for my well practised Bismillah, Al-Hamdulillah, InshaAllah, and Al-Mukhlis Luwees (Sincerely, Louis). In this case I could not blame the quality of KhairAllah’s dictation- when on the subject of camels he always spoke impeccably.