The famous archaeological piece returns to display in the French capital, where it was in 1976.
Nearly half a century after it appeared in Paris in 1976, sarcophagus of Ramesses II It will return to the French capital, where it will become the highlight of an exhibition that will open in April.
“When they told me I was going back to Paris, I almost cried with joy!” Egyptologist Dominique Farout, a professor at the Louvre School and scientific curator of the exhibition, told AFP. “Ramesses and the Gold of the Pharaoh”,
“The last time I saw it was when I was 16. I went eight times in a row,” he recalls, referring to the exhibition held that year. big palace,
Ramses II, great warrior and prolific builder of temples, who ruled for 67 years, He is one of the most famous pharaohs of the 19th dynasty.
The traveling exhibition began in San Francisco in 2022 and will end in Sydney in the fall, but the satire will only be on view from April 7 to September 6 in Paris, at La Villette.
Featuring innumerable solid gold and silver objects and ornaments, statues, amulets, masks and other sarcophagi, the show is likely to attract crowds of spectators, as tutankhamunEstablished in the same location as in 2019 (1.4 million visitors).
Both are organized by World Heritage Exhibitions, the world leader in events in this field.
lending the famous sarcophagus to France Made of yellow cedar wood, the Egyptian authorities “have made an exception (…) in recognition of the rescue of the mummy of Ramses II by French scientists who treated it against certain fungi during the exhibition in 1976,” he Told.
The coffin will be presented empty, The law prevents royal mummies from leaving Egypt.
The sarcophagus represents “the king, in Osiris attitude, with arms crossed, holding staff (scepter) and flail (whip)”.
“He is crowned by a neme (striped cloth funerary headdress), with a hanging false beard,” Farout details.
It contains some hierarchical administrative inscriptions that “report the transport of Ramses’ mummy to save it three times, around 1070 BC, and again 100 years later, at the end of the New Kingdom,” the expert explains.
,Ramses’ tomb in the Valley of the Kings was plundered and his body set alight“In this sarcophagus, to be precise.
According to Egyptologists, “Set was taken to the tomb of his father, Seti I.”
During the 21st Dynasty, it was moved again “to the cache of Deir in Bahri, west of Luxor, containing 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 being looted.
“The moms were taken from Luxor to Cairo by boat and the population rejoiced who gathered on the banks of the Nile,” says Farout.
In Paris, only animal mummies can be seen, especially cats, “raised and sacrificed as offerings to the gods,” says Farout.
These mummies were discovered in recent years near Cairo, in a necropolis of Old Kingdom kings (between 2700 and 2200 BC), the experts underline.
In addition, the public would discover the “Treasures of Tanis”, after the first named the new capital built by Ramses II in the east of the Nile Delta, Pi-Ramesses will be covered in mud.
AFP
