⚱️ How do you mix up two giant pharaohs?
Hey folks! This week, a behind-the-scenes look at a story that started with a statue and ended with me correcting National Geographic.
Last year, we published a piece in Méridien on the colossal statue of Ramesses II. You’ve probably seen it: a giant pharaoh carved from granite. Today, it stands in the Grand Egyptian Museum near the pyramids of Giza. Previously, it lay in the mud at Memphis for centuries before an Armenian engineer named Joseph Hekekyan pulled it out in 1854.
While researching, I kept hitting the same roadblock. Sources disagreed. Captions contradicted each other. The discovery was attributed to different people depending on where you looked, including in major publications. For instance, the BBC and National Geographic had it wrong.
Here’s why: there were two statues. Ramesses had a matching pair made, one in granite, one in limestone. They stood together in the Temple of Ptah at Memphis. By 1700, the temple was rubble, and the statues weren’t far behind. The limestone one was found in 1821 by Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Caviglia. It remains in Memphis (modern-day Mit Rahina). The granite one came 33 years later, thanks to Hekekyan. It now stands in the Grand Egyptian Museum. Two statues, two discoveries, two different men. Somewhere along the way, the stories got fused.
I went back to primary sources. Herodotus was of no help. Then I found Ramesses, Loved by Ptah by Susanna Thomas, an Egyptologist who worked at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. She described both discoveries in detail, separating the two statues’ histories once and for all.
When I spoke with her later, she shared my frustration: “It’s super annoying! The mistake of believing what Wikipedia says? Laziness? No one is actually checking? The two statues are quite different, after all; the Mit Rahina one is made of limestone and still retains its nose, as well as much finer details.”
So we published what we could verify, properly credited Hekekyan, and noted where the standard story falls apart. A small correction in the grand scheme of things. But Joseph Hekekyan waited 170 years for it, so it felt worth getting right.
And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.
Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).
Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.