The sarcophagus of Ramses II made a rare trip to France to be the highlight of the exhibition Ramses – The gold of the pharaohsat La Villette, where he will stay until September 6th.
The object usually never leaves Egypt. The coffin of Ramses II is one of the 180 pieces presented during the exhibition event Ramses – The gold of the pharaohswhich opens this Friday in Paris, at the Grande halle de La Villette.
The coffin that protected the pharaoh’s mummy for 2,900 years has arrived from San Francisco, the previous stage of this traveling exhibition, and will then fly to Sydney, Australia.
• The sarcophagus is back in France for the first time in 47 years
It had been 47 years since the sarcophagus had returned to Paris. And if France has the privilege of exhibiting the pharaoh’s coffin today, it is above all because it “saved” Ramses II.
In 1976, the mummy was indeed threatened by a fungus. At the request of Egyptologist Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing urges Egyptian President Anouar el-Sadat to send her to France to treat her. Egypt ends up accepting.
Coming from Cairo aboard a Transall plane of the French army, the pharaoh who died 3200 years earlier is entitled on his arrival to the protocol reserved for heads of state: red carpet, Republican Guard at attention on the tarmac and presence of many personalities.
The royal remains are accompanied on their journey by Christiane Desroches Noblecourt. Curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre Museum, she has been overseeing the operation for months and went to Cairo a week earlier at the pharaoh’s bedside.
“We had to find a solution to treat the mummy, but without manipulating it, without touching it, without taking any samples,” explains Egyptologist Bénédicte Lhoyer to France Inter.
“It had to be irradiated with gamma rays in order to stop the colonization (of fungi) and to sterilize the whole thing”, specifies the scientific adviser of the exhibition.
The arrival of the mummy of Ramses in Paris – a unique case, because an Egyptian law prohibits the exit of royal mummies from the country – coincides with the exhibition dedicated to the pharaoh at the Grand Palais, entitled Ramses the Great, which will host for five months more than 360,000 visitors.
If ancient Egypt still fascinates as much, Ramsès IIis one of the most famous figures of this civilization.
“He’s the pharaoh with a capital P, he’s the pharaoh of excess”, underlines Bénédicte Lhoyer.
“He is the one who best embodied Egyptian royalty, that’s why he is legendary and no one has ever forgotten him,” says the specialist. Warrior, politician, father of a large family – he has had 50 sons and 60 daughters – Ramesses also left behind impressive monuments.
The pharaoh builds throughout Egypt: colossal statues 21 meters high in his effigy anchored in the cliff of the temple of Abu-Simbel; a city named after him, Pi-Ramses, which steals the show from Luxor; a colossus over 10 meters in Memphis; the Ramesseum, “temple of millions of years”, in Thebes and two obelisks in Luxor – one of which sits on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, since it was donated to France in 1830.
“He’s the king of all superlatives,” adds Dominique Farout, Egyptologist and curator of the exhibition. “He had to prove that he was a god and he proved it by his longevity, by the number of monuments, by the number of children, by the dimensions, by his name everywhere.”
Ramses indeed “crossed the entire 13th century BC”, recalls Bénédicte Lhoyer. He died around -1213, at the age of 91, a then canonical age. Ascended to the throne at the age of 25, succeeding his father Seti I, he ruled Egypt for approximately 66 years, the longest reign in Egyptian history. It has little to envy to Louis XIV, 72 years of reign, and Elizabeth II, 70 years of reign.
For the Egyptians, he remains “the Great Ancestor”. After him, nine pharaohs reign under the name of Ramses in his honor.
• The coffin is a “priceless” piece of history
The coffin of Ramses II is a true historical document. “It’s a much older chest than Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great,” said Bénédicte Lhoyer, interviewed by BFMTV.
“It is a priceless piece from a historical point of view. One is with part of the coffin of Ramses II, the coffin which protected the king’s mummy for approximately 2,900 years.”
“It is a cedar chest from Lebanon, which has been painted with the representation of the Nemes, this famous striped hairstyle, we have the ureus, the royal cobra on the forehead, the sceptres, which he holds in his hand with the arms crossed on the chest”. “The tomb of Ramses was unfortunately looted around the 11th century BC,” says Bénédicte Lhoyer.
The wooden coffin is what remains after these lootings. “The metal sarcophagus was looted, and the large stone sarcophagus was destroyed, so we put (the mummy) in this object”, details Dominique Farout for BFMTV.
The mummy was then “placed in the tomb of his father Seti I to be a little protected”, continues Bénédicte Lhoyer. “Unfortunately there was further looting, so the mummy went to a hiding place, where it remained until its discovery in 1881.”
• The exhibition is full of other treasures
If the coffin of Ramses is the highlight of this exhibition, other objects presented, from other Egyptian sites, are exceptional. The exhibition at La Villette thus shows 180 pieces of inestimable value. As for the Tutankhamun exhibition in 2018some of them never left Egypt.
Visitors will thus be able to discover a gold necklace from another pharaoh, Psusennes I. “It is absolutely extraordinary because it weighs 8.640 kg. It is probably a necklace that was put on the front of the sacred boats, which had a figurehead that took the head of the god, and we put that around for the make it shine”, said Bénédicte Lhoyer in It’s up to youApril 3.
There is also a 4-meter colossus of Ramses, “which is a ‘small’ statue for Ramses”, underlines Bénédicte Lhoyer: “With Ramses we are able to make you statues of 20 meters monoliths.” “This piece, not very well known, comes from Sharm el-Sheikh, it is made of limestone and it has been very, very well preserved,” she explains.
There is also a golden mask of General Oundebaounded, a funerary mask of King Amenemopet, a silver mirror… And then many animal mummies, which are traveling for the first time, because they come from very recent excavations: lion cubs, mongooses, crocodile sarcophagi … “They came out of the sands in 2018”, mentioned Bénédicte Lhoyer on France Inter.
Will Ramses defeat the Tutankhamun’s recordwhich had attracted in the same Grande Halle de la Villette almost a million and a half spectators in 6 months? Even before its opening, 145,000 tickets had already been sold.