Exhibition “Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs” opens in Paris

This Friday, La Grande Halle de La Villette in Paris will host an exhibition featuring 181 artefacts from the Dynasty of Pharaoh Ramses II. The repaired funeral mask of Egyptian King Amenemope is one of the items on display till September 6th.

“It’s an absolutely extraordinary object, extremely fragile, extremely well restored because originally this mask was sitting on a wooden core that disappeared. So we had to rebuild the support without damaging the gold leaf. And then it’s an absolutely extraordinary object. It’s even hard to believe that this object is actually here”, said curator Dominique Farout.

The collection is one of the most remarkable presentations of ancient Egyptian civilization ever seen in France, depicting Ramses II’s pharaonic splendour through breathtaking and immersive installations.

“You know, especially nowadays, we are in a world that is always moving. And this feels like… somehow like balance, immutability. I don’t know… like tranquillity. It’s beautiful. And it’s thousands of years old. Well, I must confess, I’m getting chills although I should be used to it!”, beamed the curator.

Some of the artefacts are over three thousand years old and are being displayed outside of Egypt for the first time. An exhibition honouring Tutankhamun drew over 1.4 million visitors in 2019.

“So we have here some fairly notable examples of the jewellery that could be found in the Middle Kingdom, in other words in the classical period of ancient Egypt. It’s around 2000 BC and it’s the golden age of this type of jewellery called cloisonné. This means that you have a whole network of gold leaves in which gems are included. So we have, for example, turquoise, lapis lazuli, amethyst, so stones that were considered by the Egyptians to be eminently precious”, said Old Egypt expert Bénédicte Lhoyer.