RAMESES REBORN
Unearthed in a muddy Cairo slum, a 26ft high 3,000-year-old statue of Egypt’s greatest pharaoh
COVERED in mud in a pit flooded with sewage from a nearby slum, it is hardly a suitable fate for the most powerful of the pharaohs.
But this statue, unearthed in a working-class Cairo suburb, is thought to be of Rameses the Great and is being hailed as one of the most important-ever Ancient Egyptian finds.
Pieces of the 26ft colossus were hauled by forklift from the pit in Matariya, a suburb built on the site of the ancient city of Heliopolis.
Archaeologists have discovered the torso and a large portion of its massive head, including its right ear and part of one eye. Because of the location of the find, close to his sun temple, it is thought to be a statue of Rameses II, who ruled Egypt nearly 3,300 years ago.
The experts, from Egypt and Germany, hope to be able to piece together a likeness of the pharaoh, who was king for 66 years, had more than 100 wives and fathered countless children. Thought to be made from quartzite – a metamorphic form of sandstone – the full statue would have taken up to a year to build and be three times the size of the British Museum’s granite bust of Rameses II.
The British Museum piece inspired Shelley’s famous poem Ozymandias, with its instruction to ‘look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Egyptologist Khaled Nabil Osman said the statue which was found on Tuesday – and excavated on Thursday – was an ‘impressive find’ in an area likely to be full of other buried antiquities. The team will now attempt to extract the remaining pieces before restoring the statue.
If they are successful and it is proven to be of Rameses II – who ordered many towering statues of himself to be built across Ancient Egypt – it will be moved to the entrance of the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is due to open next year. Mr Osman said of Heliopolis: ‘It was the main cultural place of ancient Egypt, even the Bible mentions it. The sad news is that the whole area needs to be cleaned up, and the sewers and market should be moved.’ Dietlived rich Raue, head of the expedition’s German team, said Ancient Egyptians believed Heliopolis was the home of their sun god. The sun god created the world in Heliopolis, in Matariya,’ he said, adding: ‘That means everything had to be built here.
‘Statues, temples, obelisks, everything. But... the king never in Matariya, because it was the sun god living here.’ Egypt’s antiquities minister Khaled alAnani said: ‘Last Tuesday they called me to announce the big discovery of a colossus of a king, most probably Rameses II.
‘We found the bust of the statue and the lower part of the head, and now we removed the head and we found the crown and the right ear and a fragment of the right eye.’
The find could be a boon for Egypt’s struggling tourism industry, which has been hit by several setbacks.
Numbers have slumped by two-thirds since 2010, when there were nearly 15million visitors, as a result of the 2011 uprising which toppled autocratic president Hosni Mubarak and terror attacks – including the bombing of a Russian plane carrying 224 passengers.
‘It is a really impressive find’