It took three days, at least 35 people and countless hours of preparation to move the Penn Museum’s most famous artifact exactly 300 feet. Now reveling in the spotlight in its new namesake gallery, the 25,000-pound Sphinx of Ramses II greets visitors at the renovated main entrance.

We developed our strategic plan to overhaul several main galleries in 2014, but never questioned moving the Sphinx out of his former home in the lower Egypt Gallery, where he had been since 1926,” says Ellen Owens, the Merle-Smith director of learning and public engagement—at least not until last spring, when the museum decided to move forward with the Herculean effort after suggestions from Gluckman Tang Architects years prior to do so. By June, the Sphinx had assumed his new throne.

Read more at Philadelphia Style.