Nearly half a century after its exhibition in Paris in 1976, the sarcophagus of Ramses II, star of the pharaohs with Tutankhamun, is back in France where it will be the highlight of a major exhibition-event in the spring in the capital.
“When I was told he was coming to Paris, I almost cried with joy to find him here! “, told AFP Egyptologist Dominique Farout, professor at the Louvre School and scientific curator of the exhibition entitled “Ramses and the gold of the pharaohs”.
“I was 16 in 1976, he was in my room on a big poster. I went there eight times in a row,” he recalls, referring to the exhibition held that year at the Grand Palais.
Ramses II is one of the most famous pharaohs of the 19th Dynasty, a great warrior and prolific builder of temples who ruled for 67 years.
The traveling exhibition started in San Francisco in 2022 and will continue in Sydney in the fall, but the sarcophagus will only be visible in France, at the Grande Halle de la Villette from April 7 to September 6.
With the presentation of innumerable objects and jewels in gold and solid silver, statues, amulets, masks and other sarcophagi, it promises to attract crowds, like that on Tutankhamun, installed in the same place in 2019 (1, 4 million visitors).
Both are organized by World Heritage Exhibitions, the world leader in this event sector.
Exceptional loan
An exceptional loan from Egypt to France, the famous cedar wood sarcophagus painted yellow is “an exception” made to France by the Egyptian authorities, “in recognition of the rescue of the mummy of Ramses II by French scientists who had treated her for fungus at the time of the exposure in 1976,” according to Mr. Farout.
The sarcophagus is presented empty, the law prohibiting the departure of royal mummies from Egypt.
Featuring details enhanced with bright colors and eyes underlined in black on its lid, it represents “the king, in an Osiriac attitude, with his arms crossed, holding the heqa scepter and the nekhakha whip. He is wearing a nemes with a braided false beard,” explains Mr. Farout.
Appearing all along, hieratic administrative inscriptions “testify to the transport of the mummy of Ramses to save it three times at the end of the New Kingdom, around 1070 BC, then 100 years later”, explains- he.
Because “the tomb of Ramses in the valley of the kings was plundered and his body installed in” this sarcophagus. “The whole was transported to the tomb of his father, Seti I”, according to the Egyptologist.
During the 21st dynasty, it was again moved “to the hiding place of Deir en-Bahri, west of Luxor, which contained a hundred mummies including those of the kings of the New Kingdom”.
Cats
It took until 1881 to find this hiding place which was being looted. “The mummies were transported from Luxor to Cairo by boat, and acclaimed by the population which had massed on the banks of the Nile”, he says.
In Paris, only animal mummies can be admired and in particular of cats, “raised and sacrificed to offer them to the deities”, according to Mr. Farout.
These mummies were discovered in recent years near Cairo, in a necropolis of the kings of the Old Kingdom (between 2700 and 2200 BC), specifies the specialist.
Alongside them, the public will discover the “treasure of Tanis”, named after the new capital, Tanis, rebuilt by Ramses II to the east of the Nile delta after the first, Pie-Ramses, was silted up.
The treasure, consisting of a “solid silver coffin, cases of fingers and toes or masks in solid gold and jewels, comes from royal tombs found in this city in 1939-1940”, according to the specialist.