Statue of Ramses II was the image of another Pharaoh
A colossal statue of Egyptian Pharaoh discovered in Cairo March 7, 2017, belonged to a Pharaoh of the XXVI dynasty, Psammetichus I, not Ramesses II (XIX dynasty).
About the most likely, but not conclusive attribution of the statue was announced on a press-conferences the Minister of Affairs of antiquities of Egypt Khaled El-Anani. He explained that on the back of the colossus is inscribed one of the five names Psammetichus I.
According to the Minister, the researchers do not exclude that the Pharaoh Psammetik I, who lived six centuries later Ramesses II, could use the statue of his predecessor, but the probability of this is small. On the outcome of the press conference reported by The New York Times.
Quartzite statue weighing more than 50 tons found on the Northern outskirts of Cairo in the district of Matareyya archaeologists from a joint Egyptian-German expedition. Previous Egyptian-German expedition in 2006 found in the same Materii five-ton statue of Ramses II, carved from pink granite.
During the week of the colossus managed to extract from the soil and transported to the building of the Egyptian Museum in downtown Cairo. In the future, the restored statue are supposed to put in the new Grand Egyptian Museum, the first phase of which will open to visitors in the spring of 2018.
Ramses II ruled in the thirteenth century BC. His reign was marked by great military successes, including a victory over the Hittite Kingdom.
When this Pharaoh in Upper and Lower Egypt had deployed a huge construction site: a new capital Per-Ramses in the Nile Delta, the mortuary temple Ramesseum at Thebes, the temples in honor of Ramses II and his wife Queen Nefertari in the South, at Abu Simbel, etc. In honor of Ramses II was carved more statues, than the honor of any other Pharaoh.
The colossi of Ramses was known to Europeans of the New time still on the messages of ancient authors. In 1817 the British Museum acquired the Italian adventurer-archeologist, Belzoni one of the statues of Ramses from the Ramesseum Thebes. About this statue of the English romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley put his famous sonnet “Ozymandias” (Ozymandias is the Greek transliteration of the throne name of Ramses II). The Russian-speaking reader the sonnet may be known in the translation of K. D. Balmont.
Psammetik I reigned in the seventh century BC. He has achieved the centralization of Egypt, conquered in the previous century by the Assyrian kings. Its main activity was concentrated in the North of the country. The reign Psammetichus opened the so-called Late period of Ancient Egyptian history.
Julia Stetina