After nearly half a century, the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Ramses II returns to Paris

Nearly half a century after being exhibited in Paris in 1976, the sarcophagus of Ramses II will return to the French capital, where it will become the star attraction 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 Ecole du Louvre and scientific curator of the exhibition, told AFP. “Ramesses and the Pharaohs’ Gold”.

“The last time I saw it I was 16. I went eight times in a row,” he recalls, referring to the exhibition that was organized that year at grand palais.

Ramses II, great warrior and prolific temple builder who reigned 67 years, He is one of the best known pharaohs of the 19th dynasty.

The traveling exhibition began in San Francisco in 2022 and will end in Sydney in the autumn, but the sarcophagus will only be visible in Paris, at the Villette, from 7 April to 6 September.

With countless objects and jewels in solid gold and silver, statues, amulets, masks and other sarcophagi, the show is likely to attract crowds of onlookers, as will the exhibition of Tutankhamuninstalled in the same place in 2019 (1.4 million visitors).

Both are organized by World Heritage Exhibitions, the world leader in this sector of events.

Lending France the famous sarcophagus made of cedar wood painted yellow, the Egyptian authorities 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,” Farout said.

The sarcophagus will be presented empty, the law prohibits royal mummies from leaving Egypt.

The sarcophagus represents “the king, in an Osirian attitude, with his arms crossed, holding the stick (scepter) and the scourge (whip)”.

“He is crowned with a nemes (funeral headdress of striped cloth), with a braided false beard,” Farout details.

It has some hieratic administrative inscriptions which “report the transport of the mummy of Ramses to save it three times at the end of the New Empire, around 1070 BC, and then 100 years later”, explains the expert.

“Ramses’ tomb in the valley of the kings was looted and his body installed“in this sarcophagus, exactly.

“The set was taken to the tomb of his father, Seti I,” according to the Egyptologist.

During the 21st dynasty, it was again transferred “to the hiding place of Deir in Bahri, west of Luxor, which contained a hundred mummies, including those of the kings of the New Kingdom,” he adds.

It was necessary to wait until 1881 to find this deposit, which was being looted.

“The mummies were transported from Luxor to Cairo by boat and acclaimed by the population who gathered on the banks of the Nile,” says Farout.

In Paris, one can only see mummies of animals, especially cats, “raised and sacrificed to offer them to the deities,” says 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), the specialist points out.

In addition, the public will discover the “treasure of Tanis”, the name of the new capital rebuilt by Ramses II east of the Nile delta after the first, Pi-Ramesses will be covered in mud.

AFP extension