The majestic cedar wood coffin from Lebanon in which Pharaoh Ramses II rested for almost three millennia has traveled exceptionally from Cairo to Paris to illuminate a large exhibition around this emblematic figure who built the temples of Abu Simbel.
The pharaoh who reigned the longest (66 years, from 1279 BC-1213 BC) and the one who lived the longest (died at 91) was also the most respected and adulated pharaoh of Ancient Egypt for his conquests and for the impressive constructions he built. let.
Its fascinating legacy is evident in the exhibition ‘Ramesses and the gold of the pharaohs’ that has been organized in the great nave de la Villette from Friday, April 7 to September 6.
That same space in the northeast of Paris was the one that received the exhibition of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in 2019 (the most viewed in the history of Paris with 1.3 million tickets). That of Ramses will have 180 objects related to the monarch. The most emblematic and valuable of them, his coffin.
“It measures more than two meters and housed the mummy of the king, who was quite tall for the time, 1.71 meters,” Bénédicte Lhoyer, a French Egyptologist and scientific advisor to the exhibition, told EFE.
The coffin is “even older” than Ramses II himself, Lhoyer clarified: the original tomb had been looted shortly after his burial and replaced by one from the royal inventory, in which the pharaoh rested for 2,900 years until it was found by a family of Egyptian looters in the Valley of the Kings in the late 19th century.
That is why the face carved on the coffin does not correspond to that of Ramses II, but rather to one of the sovereigns of the previous dynasty, number XVIII.
This majestic coffin rarely leaves the Cairo museum. The first time he did it was precisely for an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, in 1976, in a gesture of recognition by the Egyptian government towards France for having treated the mummy of Ramses from a critical fungus plague.
The coffin of Ramses II is “a very important work in the history of humanity, very fragile,” said Lhoyer.
With coffins made of an organic material such as wood, extreme care must be taken and the degree of humidity or the difference in temperature must be measured “every second” to prevent it from deteriorating, he added.
“Ramesses and the Pharaohs’ Gold” also presents several statues, weapons, necklaces, jewelery and other objects that tell the legend of the man known as the “great monarch”, some of them never seen outside of Egypt.
At its pre-inauguration this Monday, the French Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, and the Egyptian ambassador in Paris, Alaa Youssef, were present.
Speaking to journalists, Abdul Malak noted that, with this exhibition, “3,000 years of history” are arriving “intact” in France. “This exhibition gives the impression of transporting us to that time (Egyptian civilization). It is extraordinary,” he said.
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