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Colossal bust of Ramesses II, the 'Younger Memnon'
From the Ramesseum, Thebes, Egypt
19th Dynasty, about 1250 BC
One of the largest pieces of Egyptian sculpture
in the British Museum
Ramesses II succeeded his father Sethos I in around 1279 BC and
ruled for 67 years.
Weighing 7.25 tons, this fragment of his statue was cut from a
single block of two-coloured granite. He is shown wearing
the nemes head-dress surmounted by a cobra diadem. The
sculptor has used a slight variation of normal conventions to
relate his work to the viewer, angling the eyes down slightly, so
that the statue relates more to those looking at it. It was
retrieved from the mortuary temple of Ramesses at Thebes (the
'Ramesseum') by Giovanni Belzoni in 1816. Belzoni wrote a
fascinating account of his struggle to remove it, both literally,
given its colossal size, and politically. The hole on the right of
the torso is said to have been made by members of Napoleon's
expedition to Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, in an
unsuccessful attempt to remove the statue. The imminent arrival of
the head in England in 1818 inspired the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
to write Ozymandias:
... My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
After its arrival in The British Museum the 'Younger
Memnon' was perhaps the first piece of Egyptian sculpture to be
recognized as a work of art by connoisseurs, who traditionally
judged things by the standards of ancient Greek art.
T.G.H. James and W.V. Davies, Egyptian sculpture (London, The British Museum Press, 1983)
G. Belzoni, Narrative of the operations an (London, John Murray, 1822)
S. Quirke and A.J. Spencer, The British Museum book of anc (London, The British Museum Press, 1992)