The Younger Memnon is high × wide. It weighs 7.25 tons and was cut from a single block of two-coloured granite. There is a slight variation of normal conventions in that the eyes look down slightly more than usual, and to exploit the different colours.
Acquisition
Belzoni
's men tried but failed to dig and remove it to France during his 1798 expedition there, during which he did acquire but then lost the Rosetta Stone. It was during this attempt that the hole on the right of the torso is said to have been made. Following an idea mentioned to him by his friend Johann Ludwig Burckhardt of digging the statue and bringing it to Britain, the British Consul GeneralHenry Salt hired the adventurer Giovanni Belzoni in Cairo in 1815 for this purpose. Using his hydraulics and engineering skills, it was pulled on wooden rollers by ropes to the bank of the Nile opposite Luxor by hundreds of workmen. However, no boat was yet available to take it up to Alexandria and so Belzoni carried out an expedition to Nubia, returning by October. With French collectors also in the area possibly looking to acquire the statue, he then sent workmen to Esna to gain a suitable boat and in the meantime carried out further excavations in Thebes. He finally loaded the products of these digs, plus the Memnon, onto this boat and got it to Cairo by 15 December 1816. There he received and obeyed orders from Salt to unload all but the Memnon, which was then sent on to Alexandria and London without him. Anticipated by Shelley's poem Ozymandias, the head arrived in 1818 on in Deptford. In London it acquired its name "The Younger Memnon", after the "Memnonianum".
It was later acquired from Salt in 1821 by the British Museum and was at first displayed in the old Townley Galleries for several years, then installed in 1834 in the new Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. The soldiers were commanded by a Waterloo veteran, Major Charles Cornwallis Dansey, lame from a wound sustained there, who therefore sat whilst commanding them. On its arrival there, it could be said to be the first piece of Egyptian sculpture to be recognized as a work of art rather than a curiosity low down in the chain of art. It is museum number EA 19. In February 2010, the statue was featured as object 20 in A History of the World in 100 Objects, a BBC Radio 4 programme by British Museum directorNeil MacGregor.
