How a sarcophagus fragment helped solve an ancient Egyptian mystery

Fragment of the sarcophagus bearing the name of Menkheperre, the high priest of Amun-Ra, the ancient Egyptian god of the sun and the air, who ruled the south of Egypt between 1045 and 992 BC. (Photo by Kevin Cahail)
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Updated 30 June 2024
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How a sarcophagus fragment helped solve an ancient Egyptian mystery

  • A humble piece of granite in the floor of a monastery was found to bear the name of one of Egypt’s most famous rulers
  • Ramses II, who ruled from 1279 to 1213 B.C., is regarded as one of the most powerful warrior-pharaohs of ancient Egypt

LONDON: During excavations carried out at the ancient site of Abydos in Egypt in 2009, archaeologists made an unexpected discovery — the remains of a lost Coptic monastery, believed to have been founded in the fifth century by the leader of the Coptic church, Apa Moses.

That was fascinating enough, but even bigger surprises would emerge.

Deep within the excavated ruins of the monastery, archaeologists from the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities made a discovery that shone a light on the tensions that existed between the early Coptic church and the remnants of Egypt’s “pagan” past.

Pressed into service as a humble doorstep within the monastery was a piece of red granite, 1.7 meters long and half as wide.




The sarcophagus of Merenptah. (Photo courtesy: Frédéric Payraudeau)

A partial inscription revealed it was part of the sarcophagus of Menkheperre, the high priest of Amun-Ra, the ancient Egyptian god of the sun and the air, who ruled the south of Egypt between 1045 and 992 B.C. 

The find seemed to solve one mystery ­— where Menkheperre had been buried. Previously it was thought that he must have been entombed near his power base at Thebes, in a grave yet to be discovered. Now, it seemed, he had been laid to rest in Abydos.

The existence of a fragment of his sarcophagus, set within the floor of the monastery, as the authors of a paper published in 2016 surmised, owed something to Apa Moses’ “persecution of local pagan temples,” and was “perhaps the result of the fervor with which his followers dismantled pagan structures and tombs throughout Abydos.”

And that is where the story might have ended, but for Frederic Payraudeau, an Egyptologist at Sorbonne University in Paris.




Frederic Payraudeau, an Egyptologist at Sorbonne University in Paris. (Supplied)

Ayman Damrani and Kevin Cahail, the Egyptian and American archaeologists who had discovered the fragment, recognized from the outset that the sarcophagus had another occupant before Menkheperre. 

They saw that earlier inscriptions had been overwritten and suggested the original owner might have been an unknown royal prince.

The fragment, made of hard red granite, represented “a much greater allocation of time and resources involved in its construction,” they wrote, than would have been expended on the sarcophagus of even a high official. 

This suggested the original owner “had access to royal-level workshops and materials,” and might, they concluded, have been a prince by the name of Meryamunre or Meryamun.




In this photo taken on May 11, 1976, Egyptian Ambassador Naguib Kadry and Egyptologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt attend the opening of the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Ramses II during an exhibition dedicated to him at the Grand Palais in Paris.  (AFP/File)

“When I read this article, I was very interested because I am a specialist of this period,” said Payraudeau, “and I was not really convinced by the reading of the inscriptions.”

He added: “I already suspected that this fragment was from the sarcophagus of a king, partly because of the quality of the object, which is very well carved, but also because of the decoration.”

This consisted of scenes from the Book of Gates, an ancient Egyptian funerary text reserved almost exclusively for kings.

“It is known in the Valley of the Kings on the walls of the tombs, and on the sarcophagi of the kings, and it was used only by one person, who was not a king, in a later period.

“But this is an exception, and it would have been very strange for a prince to have used this text — and especially a prince that we hadn’t heard of.”

The photographs published with the paper were of too low quality to confirm his suspicions, so he asked the author to send him high-resolution copies. “And when I saw the enlarged photographs of the objects, I could clearly see the cartouche of a king.”




The royal cartouche, or inscription, including Ramses’ name. (Photo courtesy: Frédéric Payraudeau)

A cartouche is an oval frame, underscored at one end and containing a name written in hieroglyphics, that was used to indicate royalty. This one read “User-Maat-Ra Setep-en-Ra.” 

Translated roughly as “The justice of Ra is powerful, Chosen of Ra,” it was the throne name of one of the most famous rulers of ancient Egypt — Ramses II.

Ramses II, who ruled from 1279 to 1213 B.C., is regarded as one of the most powerful warrior-pharaohs of ancient Egypt, famed for having fought many battles and created many temples, monuments and cities, and known to generations of subsequent rulers and their subjects as the “great ancestor.”




The royal cartouche, or inscription, including Ramses’ name (Photo courtesy: Frédéric Payraudeau)

His was the longest reign in Egyptian history, and he is depicted in more than 300 often colossal statues found across the ancient kingdom. 

On his death, after a reign that lasted 67 years, he was buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Because many of the tombs were later looted, one of his successors, Ramses IX, who ruled from 1129 to 1111 B.C., had many of the remains moved for safekeeping to a secret tomb in Deir El-Bahari, a necropolis on the Nile opposite the city of Luxor.

There they lay undisturbed for almost 3,000 years until their chance discovery by a goat-herder in about 1860. 

It was not until 1881 that Egyptologists got wind of the extraordinary find, and there among the more than 50 mummies of pharaohs, each labeled with the details of who they were and where they had been originally buried, was Ramses II.

He was in a beautifully carved cedar-wood coffin. Originally, this would ordinarily have been placed inside a golden coffin — lost to antiquity — which in turn would have been housed within an alabaster sarcophagus, which itself was then placed inside a stone sarcophagus.

Small fragments of the alabaster sarcophagus, which had presumably been shattered by looters, were found in his original tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Of the granite sarcophagus, however, there was no sign — until now.




A head believed to be that of 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramses II which was discovered in Cairo is seen March 1, 2006. An ancient solar temple has been discovered beneath a flea market in a Cairo suburb. The temple was found embedded in green shist rock beneath the market. Royal statues in pink-colored granite, probably from the time of Ramses II (13th century BC) and weighing five tons, were found in the temple. (AFP/File)

The looting of graves and the reusing of sarcophagi was a result of social and economic upheaval in ancient Egypt. “The sarcophagus was intended to be used by the owner for eternity,” said Payraudeau.

But with the death of Ramses XI in 1077 B.C., at the end of a long period of prosperity, there was a civil war and then a long period of unrest, he said.

“This was the Third Intermediate Period, which saw much looting of the necropolizes because the Egyptians knew that there was gold, silver and other valuable materials, such as wood, in the tombs.”




Drawing from the temple of Khonsu in Karnak. Closeup of pharaoh Ramesses XI while taking a sort of "shower of Life" performed by two gods. (Karl Richard Lepsius/Wikimedia Commons)

In addition to ordinary grave robbers, even the authorities took part in the looting, recycling sarcophagi for their own use. That is how Menkheperre came to be buried in a sarcophagus previously used by Ramses II.

Payraudeau is not convinced that the use of a fragment of the sarcophagus in the building of the fifth-century Coptic monastery was necessarily an act of disrespect.

“When they built this monastery, they didn’t know that they were reusing the sarcophagus of Ramses, because by this time no one had been able to read hieroglyphs for about 500 years.”

It would be 1799 before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which, with a royal decree written in three languages, including ancient Greek, provided the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphic script.




The Rosetta Stone, shown here on display in the British Museum in London, carried three versions of inscriptions of a decree issued in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts, and the bottom is in Ancient Greek. The inscriptions enabled archaeologists to decipher ancient Egyptian scripts. (Photo by Hans Hillewaert / Wikimedia Commons)

The one remaining mystery now, said Payraudeau, was where in Abydos Menkheperre was originally buried.

“Somewhere there must be the undiscovered remains of the tomb of the high priest,” he said.

“Maybe it was completely destroyed. But I can’t let go of the idea that perhaps they reused the parts of the sarcophagus which were suitable to use as pavements and so on, and that the lid, which would have been far harder to reuse, might still be lying intact somewhere in Abydos.”

In 1817, about 3,000 years after the death of Ramses II, archaeological discoveries in Egypt inspired the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to write a sonnet reflecting on how the once seemingly eternal power of the great king the ancient Greeks knew as Ozymandias had turned to dust.

Reflecting on an inscription on the pedestal of a shattered, fallen statue, part of the poem reads: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains, round the decay, of that colossal wreck. Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”




Panorama of the Valley of the Kings, the burial place of the royals of ancient Egypt. (Nikola Smolenski/Wikimedia Commons)

In fact, not only has Ramses II’s fame grown in the 3,236 years since he was entombed in the Valley of the Kings, he has also become the most traveled of the ancient pharaohs.

In 1976, after it was noticed that his mummified remains were starting to decay, Ramses was sent to the Musee de l’Homme in Paris for restoration, along with a whimsical “passport” that gave his occupation as “King (deceased).”

Since then, he has been seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors to numerous exhibitions around the world, including a return visit to Paris last year.

If the lid of his sarcophagus were discovered, it could be reunited with the mummy and its coffin, and the Ozymandias show would doubtless grow ever more popular, continuing to confound Shelley’s poetic prediction that the Great Ancestor would be forgotten, swallowed up by the sands of time.
 

 


Paris makes jailed Erdogan rival honorary citizen

Updated 3 sec ago
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Paris makes jailed Erdogan rival honorary citizen

  • Mass protests have erupted in Turkiye after the March 19 arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu
  • He is widely seen as the only politician capable of challenging Erdogan at the ballot box
PARIS: The French capital on Tuesday made Istanbul’s jailed mayor a citizen of honor, with the city’s top official throwing her support behind the Turkish opposition figure.
Mass protests have erupted in Turkiye after the March 19 arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu, a main rival to President Recip Tayyip Erdogan, on corruption charges his supporters say are false.
Widely seen as the only politician capable of challenging Erdogan at the ballot box, Imamoglu was elected as the opposition CHP party’s candidate for the 2028 election on the day he was jailed.
“Imamoglu is today unfairly prevented from representing his party and carrying the voice of millions of Turkish people,” Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo told the city council after it voted to make him a citizen of honor.
“Deprived of his freedom and his basic rights, he should be able to count on the full support of Paris,” said the Socialist, describing the French city as “the capital of human rights.”
This show of support “will perhaps allow the current Turkish authorities to hear the voices of democratic reason,” she added.
Hidalgo was among several European mayors who called for Imamoglu’s release last month.

Gaza rescuers say 19 killed in Israeli strikes overnight

Updated 08 April 2025
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Gaza rescuers say 19 killed in Israeli strikes overnight

  • Five children and four adults were killed in a strike that hit a home in the central city of Deir el-Balah

Gaza City, Palestinian Territories: Gaza’s civil defense agency said on Tuesday that Israeli strikes overnight killed at least 19 people across the Palestinian territory, where Israel has resumed its offensive against Hamas.
Civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that “19 civilians including several children were martyred” and dozens more wounded in the latest Israeli raids.
Five children and four adults were killed in a strike that hit a home in the central city of Deir el-Balah, while two separate pre-dawn attacks on Gaza City and Beit Lahia in the north left a total of 10 people dead, Bassal said.
Separately, a media outlet affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, a Hamas ally, announced the death on Monday of an employee named Ahmed Mansur in an Israeli strike on a tent used by journalists in the Khan Yunis area.
The Hamas government media office had on Monday reported the death of journalist Hilmi Al-Faqaawi, who worked for a local news agency, in the same strike, which also wounded another nine.
The Israeli military meanwhile said the strike had targeted “Hamas terrorist Hassan Abdel Fattah Mohammed Aslih,” claiming that he operated “under the guise of a journalist and owns a press company.”
It said Aslih had “infiltrated Israeli territory and participated in the murderous massacre carried out by the Hamas terrorist organization” on October 7, 2023.
Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas. Efforts to restore the truce have so far failed.
According to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, at least 1,391 Palestinians have been killed in the renewed Israeli operations, taking the overall death toll since the start of the war to 50,752.
Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.


Israel’s Supreme Court opens hearing on security chief’s dismissal

Updated 08 April 2025
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Israel’s Supreme Court opens hearing on security chief’s dismissal

JERUSALEM: Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday began hearing petitions challenging a government decision to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet domestic security agency, Ronen Bar, that cited “lack of trust.”
Opposition politicians and non-profit groups have contested the move, which Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said was “tainted by personal conflict of interest” on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.


An Israeli strike hit near a charity kitchen in Gaza as Palestinians gathered for food

Updated 08 April 2025
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An Israeli strike hit near a charity kitchen in Gaza as Palestinians gathered for food

  • The strike hit around noon as the kitchen was distributing meals to displaced people living in tent camps
  • Israel’s campaign has killed more than 1,000 health workers and at least 173 journalists, according to the UN and the Committee to Protect Journalists

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: An Israeli strike on Monday hit next to a charity kitchen where Palestinians crowded to receive cooked meals as food supplies dwindle under Israel’s month-long blockade of the Gaza Strip, one of a string of attacks in the territory that killed more than 30 people, mostly women and children, hospital officials said.
Another strike hit a media tent outside a hospital, killing two people, including a local reporter, and wounding six other journalists, medics said. The Israeli military said the strike targeted a man whom it identified as a Hamas militant posing as a journalist.
Video footage showed people carrying the body of a little girl, her face covered with blood, from the blast that witnesses said hit a tent next to the charity kitchen outside the southern city of Khan Younis. Six other people were killed, including two women, and at least 10 people were wounded, hospital officials said.
The strike hit around noon as the kitchen was distributing meals to displaced people living in tent camps. Samah Abu Jamie said her nephew was among those killed and her young daughter was wounded as they waited with their pots to collect meals for their families.
“They were going to get food. I told her, ‘Daughter, don’t go’,” she said. “These were children, and they had nothing with them but a pot. Is a pot a weapon?”
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the strike.
‘Bombed and starved again’
Charity kitchens have been drawing bigger crowds of Palestinians because other sources of food are running out. More than a month ago, Israeli cut off all food, fuel, medicine and other supplies for Gaza’s population of more than 2 million people, forcing aid groups to ration their stocks.
The World Food Program has warned that its supplies to keep kitchens going could be depleted by next week. It had to stop distributing boxes of food staples directly to families last week, spokesperson Abeer Etefa said Monday. The bakeries it ran have also shut down for lack of flour, ending a main source of bread for hundreds of thousands of people.
Since it ended its ceasefire with Hamas last month, Israel has carried out bombardments across Gaza, killing hundreds of people, and ground forces have carved out new military zones. Israel says it is pressuring Hamas to free its remaining hostages, disarm and leave the territory. Under the ceasefire deal, it had agreed to negotiate for the hostages’ release.
The heads of six UN agencies operating in Gaza said in a joint statement Monday that the blockade has left Gaza’s population “trapped, bombed and starved again.” They said Israeli claims that enough supplies entered during the ceasefire “are far from the reality on the ground, and commodities are running extremely low.”
“We are witnessing acts of war in Gaza that show an utter disregard for human life,” they said. “Protect civilians. Facilitate aid. Release hostages. Renew a ceasefire.”
Strikes hit journalists and homes
The strike outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis about 2 a.m. set the media tent ablaze, killing Yousef Al-Faqawi, a reporter for the Palestine Today news website, and another man, according to hospital officials.
The military said the strike targeted Hassan Eslaiah, claiming he was a Hamas militant who took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that ignited the war. Eslaiah was among six journalists who were wounded in the strike, according to the hospital.
Eslaiah had occasionally contributed images to The Associated Press and other international media outlets as a freelance journalist, including on Oct. 7. The AP has not worked with him for over a year.
A strike that hit a street in Gaza City killed an emergency room doctor, the Gaza Health Ministry said. Israel’s campaign has killed more than 1,000 health workers and at least 173 journalists, according to the UN and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Hospitals in Khan Younis and the central town of Deir Al-Balah said they received the bodies of 33 people, 19 of them women and children, from strikes overnight and into the day on Monday, including those from the kitchen and the media tent attack.
Some of the strike reduced houses to rubble. Imad Maghari said the blast that hit his neighbors in Deir Al-Balah at 2 a.m. was like “an earthquake,” followed by the screams of women and children. He said one neighbor lost five family members and another a young boy.
“I don’t know what danger he poses. He’s 7 years old,” Maghari said.
Israel’s military offensive in retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry, whose count does not distinguish between militants and civilians. The offensive has destroyed vast areas of the Gaza Strip and displaced around 90 percent of its population.
Israel says it tries to avoid civilian casualties and blames Hamas for their deaths because it operates among the population.
In the Oct. 7 attack, Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 people. They are still holding 59 captives — 24 of whom are believed to be alive — after most of the rest were released in ceasefires or other deals.
Protests in Israel as Netanyahu meets Trump
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with US President Donald Trump in Washington on Monday to discuss Gaza and other issues.
Dozens of protesters gathered outside Netanyahu’s official residence in Jerusalem to call for an agreement to release the captives. Many fear that Netanyahu’s decision to resume the fighting has put the remaining hostages in grave danger and hope Trump can help broker another deal.
“Now the moment of truth has come,” said Varda Ben Baruch, grandmother of Israeli American hostage Edan Alexander, addressing Netanyahu. “You are in the United States and you have to sit there with President Trump and close a deal so that everyone will be released home.”
 

 


Syria appoints finance expert as new central bank governor

Updated 07 April 2025
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Syria appoints finance expert as new central bank governor

  • Hasriya takes over from Maysa Sabreen, who had been appointed caretaken governor in late December, after an Islamist-led offensive toppled longtime president Bashar Assad

DAMASCUS: Syria’s interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa on Monday appointed Abdul Qadir Al-Hasriya as governor of the war-battered country’s central bank, state media reported.
State news agency SANA posted a picture of Hasriya taking the oath as the new central bank chief in front of Sharaa, who on Monday led a first cabinet meeting to “discuss government priorities for the next phase.”
Sharaa announced the formation of a new government on March 29.
Syria’s national currency is considered the foremost challenge for the central bank post, after its value plummeted during 13 years of civil war.
Hasriya takes over from Maysa Sabreen, who had been appointed caretaken governor in late December, after an Islamist-led offensive toppled longtime president Bashar Assad.
Sabreen, a banking expert, had been the first woman to head the financial establishment, having served as first deputy governor since 2018.
Hasriya was born in 1961 and previously lived between the United Arab Emirates and Syria.
He studied at the American University of Beirut before completing his PhD in finance at the University of Durham in Britain.
He previously worked for accountancy firms EY, previously known as Ernst & Young, and Arthur Andersen, as well as having been a member of the financial committee of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Geneva.
He was a consultant on reforms to Syria’s central bank in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme.
The Syrian pound has lost about 90 percent of its value since the start of the civil war in 2011, sinking from 50 pounds to currently around 10,000-12,000 to the US dollar.