After being stolen and smuggled out of Egypt more than three decades ago, a 3,400-year-old statue representing the head of King Ramses II was welcomed back, the country’s antiquities ministry announced on Sunday.
Currently housed in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, the statue is not on display. According to a statement from the government, the artefact will be restored.
More than thirty years ago, the statue was taken from the Ramses II temple in the ancient Southern Egyptian city of Abydos. The chief of Egypt’s antiquities repatriation department, Shaaban Abdel Gawad, stated that although the exact date is unknown, the artwork is thought to have been stolen in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
The artefact was discovered by Egyptian authorities in 2013 as it was being sold at an exhibition in London. The antiquities ministry claims that before arriving in Switzerland, it travelled to a number of other nations.
One of the most potent pharaohs in ancient Egypt was Ramses II. Known by another name, Ramses the Great, he governed Egypt as the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty from 1279 to 1213 B.C.
Egypt worked with Swiss officials to prove its real ownership. The statue was given by Switzerland to the Egyptian embassy in Bern last year, but Egypt didn’t brought the artefact until lately.
