22/12/2021
The statue of Mert Amun or the bride, as the people of Akhmim call her, her statue is considered one of the most beautiful statues that the ancient Egyptian embodied. The visitor can only look at her pharaonic charm and beauty, as he finds her in the most beautiful decorations inside her Pharaonic temple, surrounded by priests, and everyone calls her my moulati. The statue was discovered in 1981 in the city of Akhmim, next to the Kom area under the ancient tombs, during excavation to build a religious institute. A statue of the princess was discovered next to another small statue of her, and the remains of a destroyed huge statue of her father Ramses II, and another small one, as well as a statue of the god Venus. The goddess of love and beauty”, some columns, the remains of the walls of an ancient temple, and four wells with water, dating back to the Roman era, and the place was declared an archaeological area.
The statue of the princess is made of limestone, it is 13 meters high, and it weighs 31 tons. It is considered the most beautiful statue issued in the Ramesside era. Amira Muhammad, a professor of archeology in Sohag, described the statue, saying, “The wig is shown in three braids of gradual length, blue in color, held by a double strap that ends with two snakes wearing a crown, as they symbolize the maritime and tribal faces. Snakes crowned with sun disks, resting on them a drawing of the sun disk and two feathers above.
When the statue of the princess was found, the lower part of it was not found, from the legs to the feet, and the seat was also fragmented, not carrying her body, so a new base was made for it, through restoration as well as the completion of the hidden part, and the princess is adorned with some ornaments engraved from stones, Where there is an inscription of two round earrings, a wide necklace with multiple branches of gilded beads and bracelets, as well as some roses that adorn the chest, and a necklace that represents the god “Prohibitions” is held in her hand.
But the statue of the princess is now located in the middle of a popular market, surrounded by slums, tombs, and ramshackle mud houses, where the princess rests within the wall of the place where she was found, without the slightest attention from the officials. The Governorate Antiquities Authority confirmed that there is no intention to move the statue from its place, because the antiquity is related to the place in which it was found, and that in the event that a decision is issued to move the statue from its original place to any other area, the people and residents will reject this, given the statue’s connection to the city, until it became a symbol of it.
