The missing puzzle piece has finally been found!
The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced this Tuesday March 5 that it had discovered a block of limestone, measuring approximately 3.8 m, representing Ramses II seated, wearing a double crown and a headdress topped with a royal cobra.
Mustafa Waziri, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said "the fragment of the statue found matched the upper part of a statue discovered by German archaeologist Gunther Roeder in 1930."
The mission then set about cleaning and preparing the block, before modeling what the statue would look like when the two sections were combined, reaching a height of around 7m.
“His statues were nicknamed colossi and could reach up to 20 m high.
Some of them were personified, given names and became real objects of worship for the Egyptians,” explains Frédéric Payraudeau, Egyptologist at Sorbonne University.
Also read: Ramses II, the incredible destiny of the Sun King of Egypt
Ramses II, one of the most powerful pharaohs of ancient Egypt, having reigned for more than sixty-six years (from 1279 to 1213 BCE), an exceptional length of time for the time.
“He was an adult
(around 20 years old)
when he ascended the throne and he died around 90 years old, so he must have appeared as a god or an immortal king,” recalls the Egyptologist.
Also known as Ramesses the Great, he was the third pharaoh of the 19th Dynasty of Egypt.
“He will reign during the most prosperous period of ancient Egypt, he will, during his first twenty years of reign, secure the borders of the empire and during the other 47 establish real peace and economic prosperity throughout the region », Specifies the Egyptologist.
“A reign without equal, which has been compared to that of Louis XIV”
Nicknamed the pharaoh builder, he had a profusion of grandiose monuments built during his reign, “we find his traces everywhere, from the temples of Luxor to Karnak to the temple of Abu Simbel which he built in Nubia, in present-day Sudan .
They bear witness to an unrivaled reign, which has been compared to that of Louis XIV in France, a brilliant reign, in the constructions and the influence of the country, it is a model, a reference,” confides Frédéric Payraudeau.
He also had numerous statues and colossi sculpted in his image and his name engraved on almost all the temples.
“All this explains in particular the extraordinary quantity of art objects and architectural elements bearing his name that we find,” informs the Egyptologist.