As to the pillars that Sesostris, king of Egypt , set up in the countries, most of them are no longer to be seen. But I myself saw them in the Palestine district of Syria , with the aforesaid writing and the women's private parts on them. Also, there are in Ionia two figures of this man carved in rock, one on the road from Ephesus to Phocaea , and the other on that from Sardis to Smyrna . In both places, the figure is over twenty feet high, with a spear in his right hand and a bow in his left, and the rest of his equipment proportional; for it is both Egyptian and Ethiopian; and right across the breast from one shoulder to the other a text is cut in the Egyptian sacred characters, saying: “I myself won this land with the strength of my shoulders.” There is nothing here to show who he is and whence he comes, but it is shown elsewhere. Some of those who have seen these figures guess they are Memnon, but they are far indeed from the truth.
The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.
Memnon — a candidate entry Sesostris — a life
The Histories, Herodotus — translated by A. D. Godley, 1920–25
Perseus Digital Library — Herodotus, The Histories (Godley translation) · A. D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press / William Heinemann, 1920–25
license: public-domain (US: pre-1930 publication); Perseus digital edition CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded in ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md