The majestic cedar wood coffin of Lebanon in which the Faraon 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 longest-reigning pharaoh (66 years old, from 1279 BC-1213 BC) and the one who had the longest life (he died at 91) was also the most respected and flattered of Ancient Egypt for his conquests and for the impressive constructions he left.

His fascinating legacy is evident in the exhibition 'Ramses and the gold of the pharaohs' that has been organized in the great nave of the Villette from Friday, April 7 to September 6.

That same space in the northeast of Paris was the one that received in 2019 the exhibition of Pharaoh Tutankhamun (the most viewed in the history of Paris with 1.3 million entries). 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, which had a fairly considerable height for the time, 1.71 meters," Bénédicte Lhoyer, French Egyptologist and scientific advisor of the exhibition, tells 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 nineteenth century.

That is why the face sculpted in the coffin does not correspond to that of Ramses II, but to one of the sovereigns of the previous dynasty, the number XVIII.

This majestic coffin rarely leaves the Cairo museum. The first time he did so was precisely for an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, in 1976, in a gesture of recognition from the Egyptian government towards France for having treated Ramses' mummy with a critical fungal plague.

The coffin of Ramses II is "a very important work in the history of humanity, of great fragility," Lhoyer said.

With coffins of an organic material such as wood, extreme care must be taken and measure "every second" the degree of humidity or the temperature difference to prevent it from degrading, he added.

"Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs" also features several statues, weapons, necklaces, jewelry and other objects that tell the legend of the so-called "great monarch", some of them never seen outside Egypt.

At its pre-inauguration on Monday, the Minister of Culture of France, Rima Abdul Malak, and the Ambassador of Egypt in Paris, Alaa Youssef, were present.

Speaking to reporters, Abdul Malak noted that, with this exhibition, it is "3,000 years of history" that arrive "intact" in France. "This exhibition gives the impression of transporting us to that time (Egyptian civilization). It's extraordinary," he said.

  • art
  • Paris

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