British Museum [antikvár]

We enter the Egyptian Gallery between two black granite seated statues of one of the great builders of ancient Egypt, King Amenophis III, who reigned from 1417 to 1379 bc. Just behind the left heel of the larger one you will see carved the name belzoni. G.B. Belzoni was an extraordinary Italian who, having once earned his living as a strong man at London fairs, was responsible for moving several of the heaviest Egyptian statues (including the giant head of Ramesses II which you will see farther on) from their original sites to the banks of the Nile, from where they were shipped to London - no mean achievement in the case of objects weighing seven or eight tons. Behind this statue and to the left we come to one of the few items on the tour which is not a work of art as such: the famous Rosetta Stone, found in 1799 by Napoleon's soldiers in the Nile delta. The inscription on the stone is relatively unremarkable in itself: a fairly run-of-the-mill