King of the slums
Archaeologists find giant pharaoh statue in muddy Cairo pit
A GIANT statue of Egypt’s most powerful pharaoh has been dug up in a Cairo slum.
The bust of the 30ft colossus, believed to depict Ramses the Great, who ruled 3000 years ago, was dragged from a water-filled pit by a bulldozer.
Yesterday, the quartzite statue was hailed by Egypt’s antiquities ministry as one of the most important finds ever made.
A team of German and Egyptian archaeologists found the statue in in Matariya among unfinished buildings and mud roads.
The rundown area is near the ruins of Ramses’s sun temple in the ancient city of Heliopolis.
Egypt’s antiquities minister Khaled al-Anani said: “We found the bust of the statue and the lower part of the head.
“We removed the head and found the crown and the right ear and a fragment of the right eye.”
The expedition also dug up the upper half of a life-sized limestone statue of Ramses’s grandson Pharaoh Seti II.
Experts will now try to extract the remaining pieces of both statues before restoring them. If the colossus is confirmed as that of Ramses the Great, it will be moved to the entrance of Cairo’s new Grand Egyptian Museum, set to open in 2018.
The find could prove a huge boost for tourism, which has been badly hit by terrorism.
The number of tourists coming to Egypt’s beaches and ancient sites was 9.3million in 2015, compared with more than 14.7million in 2010.
Numbers plunged after mass anti-government protests in 2011 and the terrorist bombing of a Russian passenger plane that crashed shortly after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh in 2015.