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LONDON: During excavations 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 were to come.

Deep within the excavated ruins of the monastery, archaeologists from Egypt's State Ministry of Antiquities made a discovery that shed light on the tensions that existed between the ancient Coptic church and remnants of Egypt's pagan past.

A piece of red granite, 1.7 meters long and half as wide, was used as a humble threshold inside the monastery.

A partial inscription revealed that it was part of the sarcophagus of Menkheperre, the high priest of Amun-Re, the ancient Egyptian god of the sun and air, who ruled southern Egypt between 1045 and 992 BC.

This discovery appears to solve the mystery of where Menkheperre was buried. Previously, it was thought that he must have been buried near his power base in Thebes, in a yet-to-be-discovered tomb. It now appeared that he rested in Abydos.

The existence of a fragment of his sarcophagus, placed in the floor of the monastery, as the authors of an article published in 2016 surmised, owed something to Apa Moses' persecution against local pagan temples, and may have been -be the result of the fervor with which his followers dismantled pagan structures and tombs throughout Abydos.

And that's where the story could have ended without Frédéric Payraudeau, an Egyptologist at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

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

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

The fragment, made of hard red granite, represented a far greater investment of time and resources in its construction, they wrote, than would have been spent on the sarcophagus of a high-ranking official.

This suggested that the original owner had access to royal-level workshops and materials, and could have, they concluded, been a prince named Meryamunre or Meryamun.

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

He adds: I already suspected that this fragment came from the sarcophagus of a king, partly because of the quality of the object, very well sculpted, but also because of the decoration.

These were 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 tombs and on the sarcophagi of kings, and it was used by only one person, who was not a king, at a later time.

But this is an exception, and it would have been very strange if a prince had used this text, especially a prince of whom no one had heard.

The photographs published with the newspaper were of too poor 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.

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

Roughly translated as The Justice of Ra is Mighty, Chosen of Ra, this was the throne name of one of the most famous rulers of ancient Egypt, Ramesses II.

Ramses II, who reigned from 1279 to 1213 BC, considered his subjects as the great ancestor.

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

When he died, after a reign that lasted 67 years, he was buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Many tombs having subsequently been looted, one of his successors, Ramses IX, who reigned from 1129 to 1111 BC. city ​​of Luxor.

They remained there undisturbed for nearly 3,000 years until their accidental discovery by a shepherd around 1860.

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

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

Small fragments of the alabaster sarcophagus, probably broken by looters, were found in his original tomb in the Valley of the Kings. However, there was no trace of the granite sarcophagus until now.

The robbing of tombs and the reuse of sarcophagi were the result of the social and economic upheavals of ancient Egypt. The sarcophagus was intended to be used by the owner for eternity, Payraudeau said.

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 was marked by much looting of the necropolises because the Egyptians knew that there was gold, silver and other precious materials, such as wood, in the tombs.

Besides ordinary grave robbers, even the authorities participated in the looting, recycling the sarcophagi for their own use. This is how Menkhéperre was buried in a sarcophagus previously used by Ramesses II.

Payraudeau is not convinced that the use of a fragment of the sarcophagus in the construction of the 5th-century Coptic monastery necessarily constituted an act of disrespect.

When they built this monastery, they did not know that they were reusing the sarcophagus of Ramesses, because at that time no one had been able to read hieroglyphics for about 500 years.

It was not until 1799 that the Rosetta Stone was discovered, which, together with a royal decree written in three languages, including ancient Greek, provided the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.

The only mystery that remains today, Payraudeau said, is where Menkheperre was originally buried in Abydos.

There must be the undiscovered remains of the high priest's tomb somewhere, he said.

Maybe it was completely destroyed. But I can't give up the idea that they may have reused the parts of the sarcophagus which were suitable for use as pavements etc., and that the lid, which would have been much more difficult to reuse, might still be found intact somewhere in Abydos. .

In 1817, some 3,000 years after the death of Ramesses 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 known to the ancient Greeks as Ozymandias had turned to dust.

Reflecting on an inscription on the pedestal of a broken and fallen statue, part of the poem reads: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look at my works, you mighty ones, and despair! Nothing else remains, around the decadence, of this colossal wreck. Boundless and bare, the lonely, flat sands stretch far into the distance.

In fact, not only did Ramses II's fame increase in the 3,236 years since he was buried in the Valley of the Kings, but he also became the most traveled of the ancient pharaohs.

In 1976, after noticing that his mummified remains were beginning to decompose, Ramses was sent to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris for restoration, accompanied by a fanciful passport indicating his profession as a (deceased) king.

It has since been seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors at 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 his coffin, and the spectacle of Ozymandias would no doubt become increasingly popular, continuing to confound Shelley's poetic prediction that the Great Ancestor would be forgotten, swallowed up by the sands of time.