About memnon.net

• Introduction
• What’s New
• Why Memnon?

Introduction

My name is Clyde Adams III, alias Memnon. Email me, if you wish. This is my personal web site, which has existed and evolved since 1996, although the memnon.net domain itself is relatively new.

This site is not connected with the Swedish company Memnon Network Applications, which owns the Swedish domain and site memnon.se. They contacted me in November, 2001, wanting to acquire the domain memnon.net from me, but I was not interested.

What’s New

• Visit ConPix! Pictures from AnimeExpo 2004, AnimeExpo 2005, and Sugoi Con 2004 will be up Real Soon Now.
• 2005-11-06 The New York City Anime page has been spun off to its own domain: NYC-Anime.com
  My contact email has been updated.
  The “Why Memnon?” section below has been corrected and updated.

Why Memnon?

I have long been fascinated by the cry of Memnon, the sound made by a statue to greet the dawn.

The picture on the home page shows the Memnon colossi; the one on your right as you face them is the one that made the sound. These statues represent the Pharaoh Amenhotep III and stood in front of his funerary temple; the temple itself is long gone.

Because of the statue’s cry at dawn (and possibly because they garbled the Pharaoh’s name), the Greeks and Romans identified the statue with the legendary hero Memnon, son of Eos, Greek goddess of the dawn. (The Roman counterpart of Eos is Aurora.) That legendary Memnon was an Ethiopian prince mentioned in the Iliad; he fought on the Trojan side in the Trojan War. Memnon’s father was the Ethiopian king Tithonus, and his grandfather was the Trojan king Laomedon.

I first heard of the cry of Memnon from a short passage in Oscar Wilde’s story “The Happy Prince”, which I read in 1965. Shortly after that, I read Rupert T. Gould’s article “The Cry of Memnon” in his book Enigmas.

In May, 2003, I received an email from composer Franklin Stover, who informs me he “wrote a work for orchestra in 1990 I call, ‘Hymn of Memnon’. It was recently recorded in Slovakia. I too have long been interested in Memnon.”

I just discovered that Edgar Allan Poe’s poem "The Coliseum" refers to the cry of Memnon:

Prophetic sounds, and loud, arise forever
From us, and from all ruin, unto the wise,
As in old days from Memnon to the sun.
We rule the hearts of mightiest men:—we rule
With a despotic sway all giant minds.

Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) wrote a prose poem called “The Memnons of the Night”; (1917).

The name Memnon occurs in history and literature in some other, unrelated contexts. For example

• Memnon of Rhodes (380–333 BC) was a Greek mercenary general who served Darius III, the Great King of Persia, and fought Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia.
• Memnon was the title character of a 1749 story by François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), aka Voltaire: “Memnon ou la Sagesse humaine [Memnon or Human Wisdom].”
• Memnon is the name of a major character, an evil, conquering king (not the title character), in the 2002 feature film The Scorpion King.