Special Exhibit: ‘Ramses the Great and the Gold of the Pharaohs’

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Ramses the Great exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. This is a limited time exhibit that closes February 12, and it’s well worth a visit. Just be sure to buy the virtual reality experience if purchasing tickets – it’s not automatically included like I thought, so I missed out. I would also recommend the audio tour, as it allows greater insight into the many beautiful exhibits.

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The main section of the exhibit is absolutely packed with beautiful art and amazing technology, including screens that display hologram-like images of battles and mummies. Much of the art is related to Ramses the Great, but there is also plenty of other art. There are dozens of jewelry pieces, many of which were buried with multiple pharaohs when later rulers dug up their predecessor’s tombs. One room contains animal mummies ranging from cats to crocodiles to mongooses, and even the walls of several rooms are designed to look like rock or tomb walls. There is also a fairly famous painted limestone relief depicting Ramses smiting the three enemies of Egypt (a Syrian, a Nubian, and a Libyan) in the Battle of Kadesh (shown at top; Egyptian, 19th Dynasty, on loan from Egyptian Museum, Cairo).

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The exhibit features many beautiful sarcophagi. One is that of an artist—beautiful, but not overly expensive or ornate, aside from its painted images from The Book of the Dead (the most famous copy of which has been in the British Museum since the 19th Century). The de Young Museum has posted a very informative article about the life of the craftsman Sennedjem who was buried in this coffin. Another is particularly interesting: made of silver, which was more highly valued than gold, and designed to look like the falcon-headed god Sokar, this coffin not only features its beautiful and unique exterior, but the inner layers of a mask and amulets in which the mummy was once wrapped. One outer sarcophagus includes a beautiful relief carving of the sky goddess Nut underneath the lid. Although there is a mirror there to see the relief, I’d recommend looking up at the lid to get a better view.

One particularly interesting display is a diorama of Abu Simbel, two famous temples. As I alluded in my most recent blog entry, they were relocated when the Nile River was dammed, which required carving them out of the rock piece by piece, assembling them again higher on the mountain, and creating a fake mountain around them so they looked natural. This intensive process was made more complicated by the fact that Abu Simbel was designed so that light perfectly illuminated the interior of the big temple two days a year, which movers bore in mind (and recreated) when reassembling the site.

This Ramses exhibit was beautiful, instructive, and full of variety. I would highly recommend a visit to anyone who can get tickets, as it won’t be around for much longer.

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Did you know? In ancient Greek, Ramses the Great is known as Ozymandias. News of the impending arrival of the Younger Memnon statue to the British Museum inspired English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley – if you don’t read poetry, you may know him better as the husband of teenage writing phenom Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, whose 1818 novel ‘Frankenstein’ arguably invented the entire genre of science fiction. In his most famous poem (a warning against hubris by the then-heads of European countries, including Napoleon), Ozymandias, Percy Shelley depicts the “shattered visage” of Ramses and contrasts its desert-reclaimed setting with the pharaoh’s self-importance:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819 edition (from ‘Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems’, p.92; cited and linked in Wikipedia – and yes, that’s really how ‘desert’ was spelled in the early 19th Century)