Statue of Ramesses

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

A History of the World in 100 Objects has arrived in Egypt around 1250BC. At the heart of this programme is the British Museum's giant statue of the king Ramesses II, an inspiration to Shelly and a remarkable ruler who build monuments all over Egypt. He inspired a line of future pharaohs and was worshipped as a god a thousand years later. He lived to be over 90 and fathered some 100 children! Neil MacGregor considers the achievements of Ramesses II in fixing the image of imperial Egypt for the rest of the world. And the sculptor Antony Gormley, the man responsible for a contemporary giant statue, The Angel of the North, considers the towering figure of Ramesses as an enduring work of art.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects
0:07.8	from BBC Radio 4. My name is Ozzy Mandius, King of Kings.
0:20.0	Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
0:25.0	That was Shelly, writing in 18, with a poetic vision inspired by the monumental figure here in the British Museum whose serenely
0:35.4	commanding face is looking down at me from a very great height. Sheli's Ozymandias is our Ramesses the second, King of Egypt around 1270 BC and his giant head dominates this space from a gallery plinth
0:58.4	although would once have been even higher.
1:02.2	It's difficult for us to conceive now with our air tools and electrical ways of
1:09.0	cutting stone. Quite what an extraordinary achievement.
1:13.0	Not simply the scale and weight of a sculpture of this size is,
1:18.0	but also the degree of finish.
1:22.0	There's no way of looking at this man and seeing him as a failure.
1:26.0	He absolutely deserves the epithet, the great he really was.
1:32.0	A history of the world in a hundred objects. The statue of Ramesses II, approximately 1250 BC, of granite from Thebes in Egypt. When it arrived in England, this was by far the largest Egyptian sculpture that the British had ever seen,
2:12.0	and it was the first object that gave them a sense of
2:15.4	the colossal scale of the Egyptian achievement. The upper body alone is about
2:22.0	eight or nine feet high and it weighs about 7 tons.
2:26.0	This is a king who understood as never before the power of scale, the purpose of awe.
2:36.0	Ramesses II ruled Egypt for an astonishing 66 years,
2:41.0	presiding over a new golden age of Egyptian prosperity and imperial power.
2:45.8	He was lucky.
2:46.9	He lived to be over 90, he fathered around 100 children, and during his reign the Nile
2:52.0	floods obligingly produced a succession of bumper harvests.
	...

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