Ramesses II (1279 – 1213 BC), The Colossal Bust of

Colossal Bust of Ramesses II, the 'Younger Memnon'

Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great, was the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt. He is often regarded as the greatest, most celebrated, and most powerful pharaoh of the Egyptian Empire. King Ramses the Second took the throne of Egypt in his early twenties (around 1279 BC) and ruled for an amazing 67 years, the second longest reign of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs, until his death (1213 BC).

The Younger Memnon statue is one of two colossal granite heads from the Ancient Egyptian mortuary temple called the Ramesseum at Thebes, depicting the pharaoh Ramesses II wearing the Nemes head-dress with a cobra diadem on top. This incomplete statue has lost its body and lower legs; it is one of a pair which originally flanked the doorway of the Ramesseum.

The bust is 2.7 m high (9 ft.) by 2 meters wide (6 1/2 ft. across the shoulders), weighs 7.25 tons, and was cut from a single block of two-colored granite; with a slight variation of normal conventions in that the eyes look down slightly more than usual and to exploit the different colors (broadly speaking, the head is in one color, and the body another).

Napoleon's men tried and failed to dig and remove it to France during his 1798 expedition there, during which he did acquire but then lost the Rosetta Stone. It was during this attempt that the hole on the right of the torso (just above Ramesses's right nipple) is said to have been made.

This model is a 3D Scan of this piece captured at the British Museum by Cosmos Wenman in October, 2012, and shared with us under the Creative Commons Attribute