Ramesses II succeeded his father Sethos I in Egypt around 1279 BC and ruled for 67 years.

Weighing 7.25 tons, this fragment of statue was cut from a single block of two-coloured granite. He is shown wearing the nemes head-dress surmounted by a cobra diadem. The sculptor has angled the eyes down slightly, causing intimacy with the viewer. It was retrieved from the tomb of Ramesses at Thebes (the 'Ramesseum') by Giovanni Belzoni in 1816. Belzoni wrote a fascinating account of his struggle to remove it, both literally, given its colossal size, and politically. The hole on the right of the chest is said to made on Napoleon's expedition to Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, in an unsuccessful attempt to remove the statue. The head arrived in England in 1818