After Nearly 100 Years, Archaeologists Finally Found The Missing Part Of An Ancient Egyptian Statue

In 1930, the Egyptologist Gunther Roeder was leading a German team in what would become a decade-long seasonal excavation at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Hermopolis Magna, also known as Khemenu (now El Ashmunein). Among the many discoveries Roeder and his team made, which included most of a massive temple site, was the bottom half of a large statue that turned out to be that of Ramses II (also written Ramesses II). This long-reigning pharaoh from the 13th century B.C., known as Ramses the Great, was a warlike ruler who commissioned many statues of himself, and Roeder's discovery was one of many that remain today across Egypt.

For nearly 100 years, the statue fragment remained just that until early 2024, when a joint Egyptian-U.S. team unearthed the rest of the statue in the sa