Two stone giants sit in the Egyptian desert.

Each was carved from a single block of stone, weighs 720 tons, and was dragged 420 miles from its quarry. They are so large that, three and a half thousand years later, you can still see them from more than 10 miles away...

They are called the Colossi of Memnon, and they were built around 1350 BC by the pharaoh Amenhotep III to guard the entrance of his mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile, opposite modern-day Luxor.

Each Colossus stands 18 metres (60 ft) tall, including its plinth. They were carved from a stone called quartzite sandstone, quarried at el-Gabal el-Ahmar, the Red Mountain, near modern-day Cairo. The southern statue is a single, unbroken block. The northern was cracked by an earthquake in 27 BC and partially rebuilt in the Roman era.

Quartzite sits at 7 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. The Egyptians who built the Colossi were a Bronze Age culture. Their chisels were made of copper and bronze, which register around 3 to 4 on the Mohs scale. They could not have cut the stone directly. The mainstream answer is that they did it by abrasion. According to archaeologists, they used small handheld stones harder than quartzite, mixed with sand and water, and slowly ground the figures out of the block by hand...

Each finished statue weighs 720 tons, roughly the weight of a hundred adult elephants. They were quarried near Cairo and installed near Luxor, 420 miles south. The Nile flows northward, which means a river journey would have required moving the stones against the current. Many experts believe that the stones are too heavy to have been transported upstream on the Nile. Some Egyptologists argue, instead, that the blocks were dragged overland on wooden sleds for the entire 420 miles.

Whatever happened in the desert thirty-four centuries ago, and however it happened, the result is harder to argue with than any explanation. The statues still stand. And I think that is the most astonishing thing of all: they have stood through every empire that has tried to outlive them.

The Colossi were already standing when Tutankhamun was born. They were standing when Alexander entered Egypt. They were standing when Cleopatra met Caesar. They were standing when Roman tourists climbed up to scratch their names into the plinth. And they are still standing today...

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