Put yourself in the situation: imagine you are in your garden, spade in hand, doing the usual tasks of farming, like removing some cucumbers or moving soil. At that point you hit something really hard and uncover the remains of a colossal statue of a pharaoh. It sounds like a movie, but it’s real: it happened to an Egyptian farmer named Khaled al-Shahat, who notified the country’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities to start an investigation. As a curiosity, according to Youm7 cited by Yahoo, he grows cucumbers in a greenhouse.
discovery. Khaled al-Shahat’s land is in Behbeit el Hagar, a village in the Nile Delta about 130 kilometers north of Cairo, known for the ruins of a large temple to Isis, as detailed in Smithsonian Magazine. What the farmer found was a block of pink stone covered in hieroglyphics.
Following the caveat, rescue excavations revealed the remains of two colossal statues. The first is the 1.6m head of Ramses II. A good part of a second royal statue, measuring about 2.4 meters, also appeared. Next to it was the block of pink granite that exposed everything, more than a meter tall and with two inscriptions naming Ramses II as “King of Upper and Lower Egypt” and “Son of Ra”. Excavation continues.
Both probably belong to Ramesses II. The head of Ramses II wears a double crown, symbolizing the union of Upper and Lower Egypt, and the upper part is preserved from a fragment of a dorsal pillar found with the king’s name of Horus. The foot or base of the second figure has not yet been found. Of course, he preserves his facial features well and wears the Nemes headdress, although the top of it is damaged. The first statue is identified by that inscription. The second one, on the other hand, has been attributed to Ramses II due to its facial similarity to the first, so its identity has yet to be confirmed.
What were those statues doing there?. Ramses II reigned for 66 years between 1279 and 1213 BC. c., and controlled an empire that reached into present-day Syria. He was the pharaoh who built the most monuments and statues, according to the Smithsonian. That’s why over the years, archaeologists have come across images of him all over the country, from Abu Simbel to the Delta.
But the temple of Isis at Behbeit el-Hagar is much later. It was founded during the reign of Nectanebo II (360-342 BC) and completed by Ptolemy II and III, according to an article by Imam about the site. It collapsed before the beginning of the third century AD. C., probably due to an earthquake. This leaves a question in the air: So how did the statues get to where they appeared?
Why is it important?. Considering the size of the head, the ministry estimates that the complete statue, including the base, will measure around 8.5 meters. This fits with what experts already suspected: Ramses II ordered important work there.
In fact, in 2017, Cairo University Egyptologists Mahmoud Emam and Ehab Abdel-Zaher described two fragments with the name of Ramses II that appeared in the infrastructure work next to the temple. They suggested that there was an earlier building on the site, from the time of Ramesses II or later. Emam, who was not involved in the excavation, recalled to Live Science that he and his colleagues then recommended further investigation of the site.
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