Statue of Ramesses II

In 1824 Charles Felix, king of Sardinia, bought the Egyptian collection of Bernardino Drovetti, a Piedmontese who had served as French consul in Egypt, and the same year Jean-François Champollion, who had recently shown how hieroglyphs could be read, came to Turin to study it. Of everything he saw, this granodiorite king from the temple of Amun at Karnak moved him most. He called it the Egyptian Apollo Belvedere, and wrote that after six months of seeing it every day he still felt he was seeing it for the first time.

Ramesses II sits enthroned in the khepresh crown, the heqa sceptre held to his chest, his sandals on the Nine Bows, the traditional enemies of Egypt. By his legs stand two small figures, his wife Nefertari and their son Amunherkhepeshef. The face is so close to that of his father, Seti I, that the statue was once taken for Seti's, claimed by the son, though neither the carving nor the inscription shows any reworking. Because Nefertari is there, the museum dates it to the first half of a reign that ran from 1279 to 1213 BC, probably near its start.