There were two courtyards in the Ramesseum, and our statue sat at the entrance to the second one. The Ramesseum, as it's now known, covers an immense area about the size of four football pitches and contains a temple, a palace and treasuries It wasn't a tomb where he was going to be buried, but a temple where he would be venerated in life and then worshipped as a god for all eternity. One of his proudest achievements was his memorial complex at Thebes, near modern Luxor. In the far north of Egypt, facing towards the neighbouring powers in the Near East and the Mediterranean, he founded a new capital city, modestly called Pi-Ramesses Aa-nakhtu, the 'House of Ramesses II, Great and Victorious'. But all across his kingdom he erected vast new temples - like Abu Simbel, cut into the rocky sides of the Nile Valley - and the huge image of himself there, sculpted in the rock, inspired many later imitations, not least the vast faces of American presidents carved into Mount Rushmore. To save time and money, he simply changed the inscriptions on pre-existing sculptures so that they bore his name and glorified his achievements. Ramesses was a consummate self-publicist, and a completely unscrupulous one at that. He was still being worshipped as a god in the time of Cleopatra, over a thousand years later. As soon as he took the throne in 1279 BC, he set out on military campaigns to the north and south, he covered the land with monuments, and he was seen as such a successful ruler that nine later pharaohs took his name. He was lucky - he lived to be over 90, he fathered around 100 children and, during his reign, the Nile floods obligingly produced a succession of bumper harvests. Ramesses II ruled Egypt for an astonishing 66 years, presiding over a new golden age of Egyptian prosperity and imperial power. This is a king who understood, as never before, the power of scale, the purpose of awe. The upper body alone is about eight or nine feet (about 2.5m) high, and it weighs about seven tons. When it arrived in England, this was by far the largest Egyptian sculpture that the British had ever seen, and it was the first object that gave them a sense of the colossal scale of the Egyptian achievement. He absolutely deserves the epithet 'the Great', he really was." (Karen Exell) "There's no way of looking at this man and seeing him as a failure. "It's difficult for us to conceive now, with our air tools and electrical ways of cutting stone, quite what an extraordinary achievement, not simply the scale and weight of a sculpture of this size is, but also the degree of finish." (Antony Gormley) although it would once have been even higher. Shelley's Ozymandias is our Ramesses II, king of Egypt around 1270 BC, and his giant head dominates this space from a gallery plinth. That was Shelley, writing in 1818 with a poetic vision inspired by the monumental figure here in the British Museum, whose serenely commanding face is looking down at me from a very great height. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
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