A joint Egyptian-American archaeological team has pulled the 12.5-foot upper half of a colossal statue of Ramesses II from the ruins of an ancient temple at Ashmunein, the site once known as Hermopolis Magna. The fragment, depicting the pharaoh seated and wearing a double crown with a cobra emblem, has been matched through archaeological study to a lower portion first excavated in 1930 by German archaeologist Gunther Roeder. If reassembled, the complete statue would stand roughly 23 feet tall, making it one of the more significant Ramesside finds in Middle Egypt in recent decades.
A 96-Year Separation Ends at Hermopolis
The lower half of the statue had sat in relative obscurity since Roeder pulled it from the ground nearly a century ago. For all those years, the matching upper section remained buried at the same site, its existence a matter of speculation rather than certainty. The breakthrough came when a mission that included Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities confirmed through direct archaeological comparison that the newly recovered torso and head belong to the same monument. The confirmation rested on material analysis, careful measurement, and physical alignment of the break surfaces, rather than on stylistic guesswork. Together, the two halves reconstruct a single seated image of Ramesses II that would have dominated the temple space.
Ashmunein, located in the Minya governorate of Middle Egypt, served as a major religious center for millennia. Known in the Greco-Roman period as Hermopolis Magna, the city housed temples dedicated to Thoth, the god of writing and knowledge. The presence of a seated Ramesses II colossus at this site tells researchers something concrete about the pharaoh’s political reach. Ramesses II, who ruled for roughly six decades during the 13th century BCE, placed monumental statues of himself at temples across Egypt as both devotional offerings and assertions of royal authority. Finding one this large at Hermopolis, rather than at better-known sites such as Luxor or Abu Simbel, suggests that Middle Egypt held greater strategic or religious importance to his building program than many standard accounts assume.
What the Statue Reveals About Ramesses II
The recovered upper portion shows a seated king wearing a double crown that combines the white crown of Upper Egypt and the red crown of Lower Egypt, a symbol of unified rule. A cobra, known as the uraeus, sits at the brow. These are standard elements of royal iconography, but the scale of the piece is not. At 12.5 feet for the upper half alone, the full statue would have towered over worshippers and priests entering the temple precinct. The sheer size of the work required quarrying, transporting, and carving an enormous block of stone, a logistical effort that speaks to significant state investment in Hermopolis. As reported by a University of Colorado Boulder feature on the newly unearthed section, the surviving surfaces preserve enough detail to confirm both the royal regalia and the original seated posture.
Most popular accounts of Ramesses II focus on his military campaigns and the famous temples at Abu Simbel, often reinforcing a picture of a king whose grandest monuments cluster in Upper Egypt and Nubia. The Hermopolis colossus complicates that narrative by anchoring a major work of royal self-presentation in Middle Egypt. A seated statue of this size implies a fully developed temple complex at Ashmunein that may still hold additional royal sculptures and architectural elements underground. The fact that the upper half survived burial for millennia, rather than being broken up for building material as happened to countless ancient Egyptian monuments, raises the possibility that it was deliberately covered during a later period of temple renovation or religious transition. If so, the statue’s survival would reflect not only Ramesses II’s ambitions but also later communities’ choices about which monuments to preserve, reuse, or erase.
The Team Behind the Discovery
The excavation was co-led by Marina Trnka-Amrhein, a CU Boulder classics researcher, working alongside Egyptian partners as part of a long-term field project at Ashmunein. A detailed account published in the university’s arts and sciences magazine describes how the international mission combined survey, excavation, and archival research on Roeder’s earlier work to relocate the statue’s original setting. The team’s field methods included careful documentation of the statue’s findspot, surrounding architecture, and associated pottery, all of which help to refine the chronology of the temple’s Ramesside phase and its later reuse. By tying the new discovery to older records, the archaeologists were able to reconstruct nearly a century of scholarly engagement with the same monument.
The mission’s findings have been documented in a scholarly article authored by Trnka-Amrhein, Gehad, and Sourouzian, published in volume 65 of the journal Egyptian Archaeology. According to the publication record hosted by the University of Colorado, the article spans pages 4 through 9 and serves as the primary academic reference for the discovery, including stratigraphic observations and technical photographs that go beyond what short news releases can convey. That record, listed in the university’s database of faculty publications, anchors the find within a peer-reviewed framework and allows other specialists to scrutinize the evidence. In doing so, it underscores how high-profile discoveries now move quickly from field announcement to formal publication, tightening the feedback loop between excavation, interpretation, and broader historical debates.
What Remains Unknown and Why It Matters
Several open questions surround the find, starting with how and when the statue was broken. No official statement has yet resolved whether ancient earthquakes, deliberate dismantling during religious shifts, or later quarrying for building stone best explains the damage. The deliberate burial hypothesis is particularly intriguing because Hermopolis underwent significant changes during the Late Period and the early centuries of Christianity, when older temples were sometimes repurposed, stripped for masonry, or systematically dismantled. If the upper half was intentionally buried rather than discarded, that would suggest a degree of continued respect (or at least a reluctance to destroy royal images outright) even among communities that had moved on to new religious practices. Future excavation around the statue’s original emplacement may reveal collapsed architectural elements or fill layers that clarify this sequence of events.
There is also the question of companion pieces. Royal Egyptian temples rarely featured a single colossal statue in isolation; pairs of seated or standing figures typically flanked entrances, and additional statues often lined processional routes and courtyards. The recovery of one colossus at Ashmunein raises the prospect that matching sculptures, or fragments of them, remain in the surrounding area. Systematic geophysical survey and targeted excavation could answer that question, but such efforts require sustained funding, local collaboration, and long-term site protection. As the official announcement on the Egyptian monuments portal notes, the Hermopolis mission forms part of a broader program to document and conserve threatened temple remains in Middle Egypt. How much more of Ramesses II’s monumental presence still lies buried there will depend on whether that program can maintain the resources and access needed to continue.
A Find That Reframes Ramesside Geography
The Hermopolis colossus does more than add another impressive artifact to museum catalogs; it reshapes how historians map Ramesses II’s building policy across Egypt. For decades, scholarly and popular attention has clustered around the king’s southern monuments, especially the rock-cut temples at Abu Simbel and the great complexes at Luxor and Karnak. By contrast, Middle Egypt has often appeared as a corridor rather than a destination in its own right The newly reconstituted statue at Ashmunein challenges that picture by demonstrating that Ramesses II invested heavily in monumental imagery at a cult center devoted to Thoth, far from the traditional capitals. When viewed alongside other Ramesside remains in the region, it supports the idea that Middle Egypt functioned as a key hinge between northern and southern power bases, both politically and ritually.
This reframing has practical implications for future research. If Hermopolis hosted a colossal seated statue on the scale now documented, then other Middle Egyptian sites associated with Ramesses II may also have once displayed large-scale royal images that are now fragmentary or buried. The discovery encourages archaeologists to revisit earlier excavations, reexamine museum fragments with uncertain provenance, and deploy new technologies such as 3D scanning and remote sensing to trace dispersed pieces of the same monumental programs. It also highlights the value of patient, cumulative work: a lower half unearthed in 1930 and an upper half found nearly a century later now combine to tell a more nuanced story about royal presence, regional cults, and the long afterlives of pharaonic monuments. In that sense, the statue’s reunion after 96 years is not just an archaeological success but a reminder that the map of ancient Egypt’s sacred geography is still being redrawn.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
