RAMSES RISES FROM CITY SLUM
Photos of their removal draw social media accusations
Archaeologists find eight-metre statue thought to depict Pharoah Ramses II in Cairo pit,
CAIRO // Two giant statues dating back more than 3,000 years have been unearthed in one of Cairo’s most densely populated neighbourhoods.
Archaeologists have been excavating the site in Matareya since 2005 to ensure no antiquities were lost when a mall was built there. Busts and other remains from the Temple of Ra were found earlier.
The statues, whose discovery was announced on Thursday, are thought to depict royal personages from the 19th dynasty who ruled Egypt about 1200BC.
It is uncertain who exactly the statues represent but the larger one could be Ramses the Great, according to Egypt’s ministry of antiquities. The statues are in pieces, and only parts believed to be of the larger one have been retrieved. Images of a backhoe removing a section of an elongated head the size of a fullgrown man drew accusations on Egyptian social media of cavalier treatment of a rare and fragile antique.
Residents of Matareya are now calling it “the statue that they broke”, but Dietrich Raue, the German leader of a joint German-Egyptian team overseeing the excavation of the site, denied that it was broken while being recovered. Abdel Fattah Ali Ahmad, a member of the team, said the high water table would not have permitted slower or more careful excavation of the statue. Workers had to pump water out of the pit before pieces of the statue could be removed, and it had flooded again by yesterday.
Matareya, in northern Cairo, is one of the Egyptian capital’s most crowded neighbourhoods. The district stands on the ancient city of Heliopolis, which was larger than Karnak, the country’s most famous temple complex. It is famous for an obelisk in the Masalla area of the neighbourhood, which is near the site where the statues were found. The Egyptian- German team has faced many obstacles in this area, including having to remove 13 metres of rubbish and debris from one site.
Khalid Al Anani, the Egyptian minister of antiquities, said the statues would be displayed in the Grand Egyptian Museum that his ministry said would open next year.