Generally, this young Memnon is held to be a portrait of the great Sesostris, who was either the first or second Rameses; but some authorities declare that the weight of evidence goes in favour of Amenophis III., who was a pharaoh, or monarch, flourishing more than fourteen centuries before Christ. It is certain, however, that we have here a carefully-elaborated portrait of an Egyptian hero who flourished many centuries before our era. The features have all the prominent parts noticed by writers on Egyptian sculpture as characteristic of the Egyptian style. Here are the wonderfully high and prominent ears (which must have been invaluable peculiarities to Egyptian wits), the thick Ethiopian lips, the coarse nose, and the full eyes, all carefully and skilfully chiselled. Certainly, when we recall the time, realise fully the antiquity and the social state in which this great work was performed, we may see the sculptor's dawning soul in the majestic repose of this head. The lines are hard and stiff--have not the flow of the Parthenon decorations; but here is nothing mean or poor,--all large, solid, and carved with the force of a giant. The picturesque accounts of its transmission from the Memnonium at Thebes to Alexandria are familiar to the majority of readers, with the great Belzoni, with his marvellous strength and energy, urging on the workmen. "I cannot help observing," he tells us, "that it was no easy undertaking to put a piece of granite of such bulk and weight on board a boat that, if it received the weight on one side, would immediately upset; and, what is more, this was to be done without the smallest help of any mechanical contrivance, even a single tackle, and only with four poles and ropes, as the water was about eighteen feet below the bank where the head was to descend. The causeway I had made gradually sloped to the edge of the water, close to the boat, and with the four poles I formed a bridge from the bank into the centre of the boat, so that when the weight bore on the bridge it pressed only on the centre of the boat. The bridge rested partly on the causeway, partly on the side of the boat, and partly on the centre of it. On the opposite side of the boat I put some mats well filled with straw. I necessarily stationed a few Arabs in the boat, and some at each side, with a lever of palm-wood, as I had nothing else. At the middle of the bridge I put a sack filled with sand, that, if the Colossus should run too fast into the boat, it might be stopped. In the ground behind the Colossus I had a piece of a palm-tree planted, round which a rope was twisted, and then fastened to its ear, to let it descend gradually. I set a lever at work on each side; at the same time that the men in the boat were pulling, others were slackening the ropes, and others shifting the rollers as the Colossus advanced.