Almost half a century after being exposed in Paris in 1976,
the sarcophagus of Ramses II
will return to the French capital, where it will become the main attraction of an exhibition that will be inaugurated in April.
"When they told me I was going back to Paris, I almost cried with joy!" Egyptologist Dominique Farout, professor at the Louvre School and scientific curator of the exhibition, entitled
"Ramesses and the Pharaohs' Gold
," told AFP .
"The last time I saw him I was 16 years old. I went eight times in a row," he recalls, referring to the exhibition that was organized that year at the
Grand Palais
.
Ramesses II, a great warrior and prolific temple builder who ruled for 67 years,
is one of the best-known pharaohs of the 19th Dynasty.
The painted wooden sarcophagus of Ramses II, an exceptional loan from Egypt to France, will be unveiled in Paris for the first time in 45 years starting in April 2023. (Photo by STAFF / AFP)
The traveling exhibition began in San Francisco in 2022 and will conclude in Sydney in the fall, but the sarcophagus will only be on view in Paris, at la Villette, from April 7 to September 6.
Presenting innumerable objects and jewelery made of solid gold and silver, statues, amulets, masks and other sarcophagi, the exhibition is likely to attract crowds of onlookers, as did the
Tutankhamun
exhibition , installed in the same place in 2019 (1.4 million visitors). visitors).
Both are organized by World Heritage Exhibitions, world leader in this sector of events.
By lending the famous
yellow-painted cedar wood sarcophagus to France, the Egyptian authorities have made "an exception (...) in recognition of the rescue of the mummy of Ramesses II by French scientists, who treated it against certain fungi during the exhibition, in 1976," Farout noted.
The sarcophagus will be presented empty, as
the law prohibits royal mummies from leaving Egypt.
The sarcophagus represents "the king, in an Osiriac attitude, with arms crossed, holding the staff (sceptre) and the flail (whip)".
"He is crowned by a nemes (striped cloth funerary headdress), with a braided false beard," Farout details.
It has some hieratic administrative inscriptions that "report the transport of the mummy of Ramses to save it three times at the end of the New Empire, around 1070 BC, and then 100 years later," explains the expert.
"
The tomb of Ramses in the valley of the kings was looted and his body installed
" in this sarcophagus, he specified.
"The set was taken to the tomb of his father, Seti I," according to the Egyptologist.
During the 21st Dynasty, it was again transferred "to the cache of Deir in Bahri, west of Luxor, which contained a hundred mummies, including those of the kings of the New Kingdom," it adds.
It was necessary to wait until 1881 to find this cache, which was being looted.
"The mummies were
transported from Luxor to Cairo by boat and hailed by the people
who gathered on the banks of the Nile," says Farout.
In Paris, only animal mummies can be seen, particularly cats, "raised and sacrificed to offer them to the divinities," says Farout.
More than 3,300 years after his death, they reconstructed the face of Ramses II.
These mummies were discovered in recent years near Cairo, in a necropolis of the kings of the Old Kingdom (between 2700 and 2200 BC), underlines the specialist.
In addition, the public will discover the "treasure of Tanis", the name of the new capital rebuilt by Ramses II to the east of the Nile delta after the first,
Pi-Ramesses, was covered by mud.
AFP
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