A limestone relief from the reign of the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramses II and a rare sarcophagus of a mummified mouse were recovered this week, reports Nevine El-Aref This week Egypt succeeded in recovering two ancient Egyptian artefacts, the first a rectangular limestone relief from the reign of the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramses II found in a house in the Hesn Al-Arab district in the Matariya area of Cairo and the second a rare Ptolemaic sarcophagus of a mouse, formerly on display at a museum in Lisberg in Germany. The relief was uncovered when a house owner in Hesn Al-Arab complained to the Matariya governmental office that his house was falling down and needed renovation. The authorities then embarked on an inspection of the house, discovering that the owner of the neighbouring house was carrying out illicit excavations. On inspecting the neighbour's house, the police discovered an engraved limestone relief broken into two pieces, the hieroglyphic text on which included one of the names of Ramses II as "king of Upper and Lower Egypt, the master of both lands, Ramses II." Tools and measuring equipment were also found, and these were confiscated by the police, together with the relief in question. According to Youssef Khalifa, head of the Confiscated Antiquities Section at the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA), an expert committee has now verified the authenticity of the relief, early studies showing it to be part of a lintel of an entrance gate or a false door of a tomb. The relief has now been sent to the Egyptian Museum for restoration, after which it will be put on public display. The story of the recovery of the Ptolemaic sarcophagus of a mummified mouse began a year ago, when a curator at the Egyptian Museum in Lisberg raised doubts about the sarcophagus, saying that it could have been illegally smuggled out of Egypt, according to Mohamed Ibrahim, minister of state for antiquities. The curator reported his doubts to the Egyptian authorities and called the Egyptian Cultural Bureau in Germany, which confirmed that the object belonged to Egypt. The sarcophagus is very small and made of wood. Inside it, there was once the mummy of a mouse, used as a symbol of the god Horus in ancient Egypt. According to Ibrahim, the sarcophagus was among items discovered by a Cairo University excavation mission led by Egyptian Egyptologist Sami Gabra at the Tuna Al-Gabal archaeological site in the Menoufiya governorate. In November 1964, a German antiquities collector, Robert Schleicher, bought the sarcophagus from an antiquities trader in Amsterdam. He had then given it to the Lisberg Museum in 1997.
