Note 196 — Chapter XXI · THEBES.

The sitting colossus of the Ramesseum was certainly the largest perfect statue in Egypt when Diodorus visited the Valley of the Nile, for the great standing colossus of Tanis had long before his time been cut up by Sheshonk III for building purposes; but that the Tanite colossus much exceeded the colossus of Ramesseum in height and bulk is placed beyond doubt by the scale of the fragments discovered by Mr. Petrie in the course of his excavations in 1884. According to his very cautious calculations, the figure alone of the Tanite was nine hundred inches, or seventy-five feet, high; or somewhere between seventy and eighty feet. “To this,” says Mr. Petrie, “we must add the height of the crown, which would proportionately be some fourteen and one-half feet. To this again must be added the base of the figure, which was thinner than the usual scale, being only twenty-seven inches thick. Thus the whole block appears to have been about one thousand one hundred inches, or say ninety-two feet, high. This was, so far as is known, the largest statue ever executed.” The weight of the figure is calculated by Mr. Petrie at about nine hundred tons; i. e., one hundred tons more than the colossus of the Ramesseum. That it stood upon a suitable pedestal cannot be doubted; and with the pedestal, which can scarcely have been less than eighteen or twenty feet in height, the statue must have towered some one hundred and twenty feet above the level of the plain. See “Tanis,” part i, pp. 22, 23. [Note to second edition.]