A discovery we have been waiting for almost a hundred years: the upper part of the giant Ramses II statue unearthed in Egypt

A joint Egyptian-American archaeological mission has discovered the upper part of a huge statue of Pharaoh Ramses II during excavations in El-Ashmunein, south of the Egyptian city of Minya. SSPDaily tells about it.

This was reported by Reuters with reference to a statement by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities on Monday, March 5.

The statue is made of limestone and the found part of it is about 3.8 meters high. The lower part of the statue was found almost a hundred years ago - in 1930 - by German archaeologist Gunther Roeder.

The head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri, confirmed that both finds are parts of the same statue. Now archaeologists are cleaning the found block to model what the statue will look like after the parts are combined.

The ancient statue depicts a seated pharaoh wearing a crown and a headdress depicting a royal cobra. On the back side and in the upper part of the statue, there are hieroglyphic inscriptions. According to Egyptologists, these inscriptions glorify the great king, one of the most powerful pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

Ramses the Second, who went down in history as Ramses the Great, was the third pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of Egypt. He ruled the country for 66 years, from 1279 to 1213 BC.

The size of the statue, together with its lower part, is approximately seven meters.

The city of El-Ashmunein, located on the west bank of the Nile River, was known in ancient Egypt as Shmun, and in the Greco-Roman era, it was the regional capital of Hermopolis the Great.

As a reminder, a giant statue of Rameses II was found in Egypt at the bottom of a flooded stream and among the debris. The figure was found near the ruins of the temple of Ramses II, in the place where, according to legend, the world was created.