KINGS.
83, 84. We are informed by Pliny, that the Akr. andrian obelisc was erected by Mesphres or Mee. tires, the reading of the different manuscripts being different ; and since no king of the name Mestiree is mentioned by other authors, we may consider this Mesphres as the Mephres or Mesphris who succeed ed his mother Amends about 1700 B. C., or perhaps a century or two later. The hieroglyphical name of his father contains that of the god Thoth, and may therefore possibly have been intended for the Thuth. fnosis of the chronologers, who is said to have been the grandfather of Mesphres. The &disc at Alex.. andna, now called Cleopatra's Needle, like almost all others which contain three lines on each side, ex.. hibits different names in the middle and the outer lines ; from this circumstance, as well as from the greater depth of the sculptures, which is generally observable in the middle hue, there is reason to sup pose that this line stood at first alone, and that the two on each aide were added by a later monarch. The Lateran obelisc, however, is remarkable for ex hibiting the name of Mesphres on all the lines of the different sides. The Constantinopolitan obeliac has only one line on each side, with the name of Mee phres, the son of Thuthmosie. The same name is also found on the gateway of the fifth catacomb, at Byban El Idelouk : on a pillar of the palace at Ka r. nak, and in a spendidly coloured bas relief on one of the interior architraves of the gallery ; as well as on a seal of Denon, Pl. 98, and on some others brought ftem Egypt by Mr Legh.
35. The _bean obehsc of Kircher has a " son of Mesphres, favoured by Phthah ;" we must therefore distinguish this king by the name Mispkragrauthosit, who is recorded as the son and successor of Mes plwes.
37 .. 39. A multitude of ancient Greek inscriptions identify the statue of Memnon, celebrated by all an. tiquity for its musical powers, which, Strabo says, he witnessed in person, though he could not very positively decide that the sound proceeded from the statue, rather than from some of the bystanders; In one of the inscriptions we find thee word Phamenotk, not as a date, but as a synonym of Memnon, which • must be considered as identical with the Phamenoph given by Pausanias as his Egyptian name, and with the Ammenciph or Amenophis of Manetho or others, which differs from it only as wanting the article. There is,. however, some doubt to which Amenophis this statue properly belongs. Manetho makes Mem non the eighth king of the eighteenth dynasty, who may be called Amenophis the second ; but Marsham brings him down to the Ammenephthes of Manetho, or Amenophis the Fourth, and principally because he thinks that only a successor of Sesostris could have been well known in Asia; and he even supposes him to have been later than Homer, who, he says, never mentions him, though Hesiod calls him the son of Ti thonus and Aurora. But, in fact, the name of Mem
non does occur in the Odyssey, where Ulysses all. lucks to his beauty in a conversation with the shade of Achilles ; and Hesiod could scarcely have men tioned a king as descended from a deity, that was not considerably earlier than his own time ; so that the tradition of Manetho seems to be preferable to the mere conjecture of Marsham. At the same time, we cannot well call him Memnon, the son of Thuth mosis, the name of the father not agreeing with that of this king; and there is another circumstance, which seems to lead us to the third Amenophis, in termediate between these two extremes, who was the son of Ramesses Miamun, or Ramesses the lover of Ammon; which is, that Amenophis himself ap to have built a temple to Ammon in the isle of pears and is called Miamun in several of the hieroglyphical inscriptions still existing there; so that there is little doubt that the name Memnon must have been derived from Miamun. Besides the dif ferent statues of the Memnonium, we find monu ments of the same personage in almost every part of Egypt, though they are much more frequent at Thebes and in its neighbourhood. The name is marked on all the lion headed goddesses of black granite which are now in the British Museum, and on some others which are in possession of Mr Bankes. The first of this series having been pur chased, as Bruce informs us, for a large price, by Donati, for the King of Sardinia, the inhabitants were induced to take some pains in digging the others out of the sand. The building, called by the French the tomb of Osymandyas, bears al. so the name of Memnon ; and it is remarked .by Strabo, that Memnon and Ismendes may probably have been the same person. The name is also found in the grottos at Byban El Molouk, on some statues representing Osiris and in some inscriptions at Om bos, as well as on a seal of Denon, PL 98. Mr Bul lock has presented to the British Museum a scare bseus of very hard stone, on which we find the name of Memnon, together with that of his father and mo ther, whom we may call, in order to preserve the my thological analogy, Tithous and Eoa, althoughwithout asserting that this Tithous was the builder of the la byrinth, which some authors have attributed to a king named Tithoes, and others to ismendes. The mother's name occurs also alone, as " the goddess mother," on the back of a beetle in Gordon's Mum.