The Ramesses II colossus in the atrium of the GEM is eleven metres tall, weighs eighty-three tonnes, and has been moved three times in its modern history — from Mit Rahina in 1820, to Bab al-Hadid in 1955, to Giza in 2006, and finally into the atrium in 2018. A conservator's biography of a single object.
Each chapter handles one episode in the life of the statue since its modern rediscovery — the 1820 find at Mit Rahina, the Memphis century, the 1955 move to Bab al-Hadid, the 2006 move to Giza, the conservation, the 2018 installation in the new atrium.
In 1820 the Italian traveller Giovanni Caviglia, working at Mit Rahina (the village that sits on the site of ancient Memphis), uncovered the recumbent torso and legs of a colossal red-granite statue of Ramesses II. The discovery, in a flooded pit at the southern end of the Ptah temple precinct, is the start of the modern biography of the colossus.
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For a hundred and thirty-five years the colossus lay where Caviglia had found it, in the open air at Mit Rahina, in a pit that flooded each year with the inundation. The Memphis century is the longest period of the statue's modern history and the period in which most of its modern conservation problems originated.
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In 1955 the Egyptian state moved the colossus from Mit Rahina to Bab al-Hadid in central Cairo, where it was re-erected, vertical for the first time in modern times, in front of the main railway station. The square was renamed Ramses Square. The colossus stood there for fifty-one years, in the centre of one of the most polluted public spaces in the country.
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In August 2006, after a decade of debate over the conservation damage caused by the Ramses Square location, the colossus was moved by road, in a long night procession, to a temporary shelter on the future GEM site at Giza. The move was televised live and is the single most-watched object-move in the history of Egyptian conservation.
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Between 2006 and 2018 the colossus underwent the most ambitious sculpture-conservation programme ever undertaken on a single Egyptian object. The principal interventions were the desalination of the granite, the consolidation of the surviving surfaces, and the careful re-attachment of the head — which had been re-attached, badly, in the 1955 move.
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Senior sculpture conservator, formerly at the GEM-CC during the 2006-2018 colossus programme. Now based at Mit Rahina, working on the Memphis open-air museum. More on the project →