Ramesses'Odyssey

Imagine being the royal sculptor, handed the most prestigious job: carving a king’s statue. You’ve never met the man, but you know his face well. Royal likenesses were distributed as 3_d reference models, ensuring every statue, wherever it was made, matched the real thing, or at least its idealised version.

With the pharaoh’s features in mind, you start by sketching the front, sides, and back onto a granite block. Then the carving begins: gradually chipping away the excess until a rough shape emerges. Hard granite was worked with tougher basalt hammers and sand as an abrasive, while softer stones like limestone or sandstone could be shaped with flint, copper, or bronze tools.

With the pharaoh’s features in mind, you start by sketching the front, sides, and back onto a granite block. Then the carving begins: gradually chipping away the excess until a rough shape emerges. Hard granite was worked with tougher basalt hammers and sand as an abrasive, while softer stones like limestone or sandstone could be shaped with flint, copper, or bronze tools.

According to Susanna Thomas, Egyptologist and author of Ramesses, Loved by Ptah, granite statues like Ramesses II were usually finished in the quarry itself, with only the final polish completed at their destination. In an interview with Méridien, she explained that “it took about one year from start to finish. Teams of men would have been involved, including the master artist supervisor and all the other craftsmen, government officials (of course), soldiers to guard everything, and all the people needed to move the statue from the quarry to its final destination.”

First, workers dragged the statues on sledges along specially constructed quarry roads to the Nile. No animals were involved, because who needs oxen when you’ve got human resources? Dragging heavy loads over desert sand might sound like a nightmare, but the Egyptians had a trick up their sleeve: they poured water onto the sand to reduce friction, making it easier to pull.

Then came the river journey to Memphis, Egypt’s ancient capital. Luckily, the Nile flows north, exactly the direction they needed to go. That meant the 800-kilometre trip from Aswan could be done with the current helping push the barge along. And here’s another trick: to make the sailing smoother, time the delivery with the annual flood! A handy system of canals and basins took the statue the rest of the way, right up to the temple gates. If you were on that crew, you definitely earned yourself a jug of warm beer and maybe a nap in the shade.

At the Temple of Ptah in Memphis, the statue was an instant crowd-pleaser. When Herodotus passed through around 455 _bce, he gave it a glowing review — five stars, no notes. The original travel blogger did love a good colossus.

Yet, Emperor Theodosius I was no fan. By 390, he had banned pagan practices to promote Christianity in the Roman Empire, and temples across Egypt shut their doors. The statue, however, endured. In 1595, Jacques de Villamont, author of the most popular French travel book of the age, described seeing it in the sands of Memphis.

By 1700, the Temple of Ptah and its mighty monuments were in shapeless ruins. Things only got messier from there. Ramesses had two colossal statues made: one of granite and the other of limestone. Today, one stands in the Grand Egyptian Museum; the other remains in Memphis (modern-day Mit Rahina, to be precise). The twins look similar enough to confuse everyone. Some sources credit their discovery to Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Caviglia. He did find a statue in 1821, but it was limestone, not granite.

Susanna Thomas was surprised by the confusion, which she attributes to a lack of desire to check sources. “The two statues are quite different, after all,” she said. “The Mit Rahina one is made of limestone and still retains its nose, as well as much finer details.”

The real credit goes to Armenian engineer Joseph Hekekyan, who rediscovered the granite statue in 1854. It lay on its right side, legs broken above the ankles, feet missing. Three decades later, British military engineers raised both statues above flood level and set them on platforms. They stayed in Memphis for the next 60 years, until someone decided to find a better place for one of them.

In February 1955, a truck hauled the giant granite king out of the village of Mit Rahina. The locals were not thrilled. The statue had been their star attraction, drawing tourists and money for years. As if that weren’t enough, engineers had to reinforce two bridges along the route to carry the weight of Ramesses. The whole thing turned into a full-blown infrastructure saga. One wrong move, and the pharaoh could’ve ended up in the Nile!

Once in Cairo, the colossus needed major repairs. Workers spent ten months restoring its former glory. They added iron rods inside to keep it from falling apart. No more missing legs! In November, Ramesses finally took his place in the city’s busiest square, next to the main train station. The place even got a new name: Ramses Square. Because if you’re going to relocate a god-king, you might as well rename the whole neighbourhood. The move was clearly symbolic. Greeting passengers at the station, Ramesses II stepped back into his old role as Egypt’s chief image maker.

Not even close. He still had two more journeys ahead of him.

In 2006, Egypt decided Ramesses would go to the yet-to-be-built Grand Egyptian Museum. Engineers wrapped him in scaffolding, scanned every inch with lasers, and ran three test moves: two with limestone blocks, one with a replica. Nobody wanted to be the person who dropped the pharaoh’s nose on live TV.

The first big move came in 2006: two flatbed trucks carried him in a steel cage through Cairo, his head poking out so the crowds could see. The trip took ten hours to cover just 26 kilometres, cost about $1 million, and left Ramesses waiting at the museum site.

Before the final journey, engineers built a 3_d model from millions of laser scans and rehearsed the whole operation on screen. By 2017, a special road was ready. In January 2018, with a marching band, horses, and cameras, Ramesses rolled 450 metres down the road. The short trip cost $800,000, but the pharaoh arrived safe, polished, and perfectly placed in the museum’s grand hall.

In fact, it was built twice: once in data, then in concrete. Engineers tested every wall, beam, and display case in 3D before they touched the real thing. Even fallen monuments, like Ramesses’ obelisk, were scanned, reassembled, and raised at the entrance, allowing visitors to read its carvings from all sides.

Inside, the story continues. Tombs, temples, and even sunken cities were reconstructed in data before they became immersive displays. Visitors can walk through Khnumhotep’s chapel, explore the underworld’s oldest map, or see Alexandria’s ruins rise from the seabed, all first rendered in pixels, then brought to life. Tutankhamun has his own blockbuster space at the Grand Egyptian Museum, with more than 5,000 objects from his tomb displayed together for the first time. 

And at the heart of it all stands Ramesses the Great, whose statue was the first object selected for gem—hence its registration as gem 1. For the ancients, his statues were the living king, guarding, commanding, asserting power. Today, he’s watched by tourists instead of priests, but the message is the same. Three millennia on, Ramesses is still exactly where he wanted to be: present, powerful, impossible to ignore.