Tarek el-Bayoumi, on a single object across forty years.
Sculpture conservator, Memphis, on a working life spent with one colossus.
My training
I am a sculpture conservator. I read for my first degree in archaeology at Ain Shams University, then took the specialist conservation diploma at the conservation school at the AUC, and finally a master's in stone conservation at the École de Chaillot in Paris. I have been a working conservator since 1989, principally on Egyptian royal sculpture.
The colossus years
I joined the GEM-CC team on the colossus programme in 2007, a year after the 2006 move, and worked on the programme — full-time for the first six years, half-time thereafter — until the statue was installed in the new atrium in 2018. The eleven years on the programme are the centre of my professional life and the substance of these six chapters.
Why this biography
The colossus is, in my view, the single most over-photographed and most under-written object in the GEM. The press coverage of the 2006 move, of the 2018 installation, of the 2025 opening has been enormous; the conservation literature is buried in the technical journals where the general reader will not find it. The biography is an attempt to bring the conservation story to a wider readership.
On Mit Rahina
I live now at Mit Rahina, the village that sits on the site of ancient Memphis, where the colossus was found in 1820 and where I work part-time on the Memphis open-air museum's stone-conservation programme. To live at Mit Rahina, after eleven years of working on the colossus, is to live at the start of the statue's modern biography.
Sources
The biography is written from the published conservation literature on the colossus (the technical reports of the GEM-CC are foundational), from the archival records of the 1955 and 2006 moves, and from my own working notes and photographs from the GEM-CC years. The bibliography is available on request.
What this is not
It is not a technical conservation report. The conservation interventions on the colossus are described in published technical literature that is accessible to specialists. The biography is for the general reader who wants to understand the statue's life as an object — where it has been, what has happened to it, who has handled it.
The eleven years on the programme are the centre of my professional life and the substance of these six chapters.
— T. el-B., Mit Rahina