VIDEO: 3000-Year-Old Statue Was Discovered in Egypt. What Does This Mean for History?

Everyone knows that Egypt was once a great power and spread across a huge land. They are a cultural cradle and have affected the world as it is today.

Still, there are still a lot of things about them that we don’t know. For example, how they managed to build such beautiful and technical buildings without all sorts of tools and machines.

According to dailymail.co.uk, archaeologists from Egypt and Germany have found a massive 26ft (8 meters) statue submerged in ground water in a Cairo slum.

Researchers say it probably depicts revered Pharaoh Ramses II, who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.

The discovery, hailed by the Antiquities Ministry as one of the most important ever, was made near the ruins of Ramses II’s temple in the ancient city of Heliopolis, located in the eastern part of modern-day Cairo.

Ramses the Great was the most powerful and celebrated ruler of ancient Egypt. Known by his successors as the ‘Great Ancestor’, he led several military expeditions and expanded the Egyptian Empire to stretch from Syria in the east to Nubia in the south.

He was the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt and ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE.

‘We found the bust of the statue and the lower part of the head and now we removed the head and we found the crown and the right ear and a fragment of the right eye,’ Anani said.

Archaeologists, officials, local residents, and members of the news media looked on as a massive forklift pulled the statue’s head out of the water

The joint Egyptian-German expedition, which included the University of Leipzig, also found the upper part of a life-sized limestone statue of Pharaoh Seti II, Ramses II’s grandson, which is 80 centimeters long.

The sun temple in Heliopolis was founded by Ramses II, which increases the likelihood the statue is of him, archaeologists say.
It was one of the largest temples in Egypt, almost double the size of Luxor’s Karnak, but was destroyed in Greco-Roman times.

Experts will now attempt to extract the remaining pieces of both statues before restoring them.

If they are successful and the colossus is proven to depict Ramses II, it will be moved to the entrance of the Grand Egyptian Museum, set to open in 2018.

Dietrich Raue, head of the expedition’s German team, told Reuters that ancient Egyptians believed Heliopolis was the place where the sun god lives, meaning it was off-limits for any royal residences.

‘The sun god created the world in Heliopolis, in Matariya.

That’s what I always tell the people here when they say is there anything important. According to the pharaonic belief, the world was created in Matariya,’ Raue said.

‘That means everything had to be built here. Statues, temples, obelisks, everything. But … the King never lived in Matariya, because it was the sun god living here.’

The find could be a boon for Egypt’s tourism industry, which has suffered many setbacks since the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011 but remains a vital source of foreign currency.