Colossal Bust of Ramesses the Second, the Younger Memnon
About 1250 BC
The upper half of a colossal seated king towers over the Egyptian gallery, weighing more than seven tonnes. He wears the striped nemes headcloth with the cobra on the brow, and the calm, slightly smiling face is that of Ramesses the Second, who ruled Egypt for sixty six years in the thirteenth century BC. The stone is a two coloured granite, and the sculptors placed the join so that the head is in the lighter band and the body in the darker. A hole drilled in the right shoulder was made by French soldiers who tried and failed to remove the statue in the years around eighteen hundred.
Look at the surface. The face is polished smooth while the headcloth keeps a matte finish, and the eyes are cut so that they meet the gaze of someone standing far below, since the complete statue was about nine metres tall. The nose is intact, which is rare. Egyptian royal sculpture avoided drama; what it wanted was permanence, and the slightly turned head and steady expression give the king an air of eternal patience. The name Younger Memnon comes from early travellers who linked such statues to the Greek hero Memnon.
The bust came from the Ramesseum, the king's memorial temple on the west bank at Thebes, where its lower half still lies. In eighteen sixteen the circus strongman turned excavator Giovanni Belzoni had it dragged to the Nile on rollers by teams of local workers, a feat that took weeks in the summer heat. It arrived in London in eighteen eighteen, and rumours of its coming inspired Percy Shelley's poem Ozymandias, with its shattered visage and sneer of cold command. It was one of the first great Egyptian sculptures seen in Europe and changed how people imagined ancient Egypt.
Did You Know? Shelley wrote Ozymandias in eighteen seventeen while this statue was on its way to London, in a friendly competition with a fellow poet on the same theme.
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