A finely crafted marble head of a statue depicting an elderly man from the Ptolemaic Period has been located at Taposiris Magna’s residential area. The discovery was made by a French archaeological mission headed by Dr. Joachim Le Bomin (University of Lyon – IFAO Cairo), among the ruins of a building believed to have held political significance during the 7th century CE.
According to the Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Mr. Sherif Fathy, the marble head was found in the ruins of a house which, according to Dr. Le Bomin, was built about 700 years later.
Dr. Mohamed Ismail Khaled, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, explained that the large size of the statue’s head, which reaches a height of about 38 cm (larger than the normal size of a human head), indicates that it was part of a large statue standing in a large building of public political importance rather than a private house. Mr. Mohamed Abdel Badie, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, noted that the head was carved with high artistic precision and realistic features, conforming with a particular trend for realism that flourished at the end of the Hellenistic period. Initial studies of the head’s features showed that it depicts an elderly man, with a shaved head, a face full of wrinkles, and showing rigor and signs of illness. The studies also showed that the man was a high-ranking public figure rather than a king, which indicates the importance of the site of Taposiris Magna from Ptolemy IV onwards.
Dr. Le Bomin noted that the mission is conducting further studies on the head to identify its owner and start the necessary maintenance and restoration work.
Located along the sea on the Nile’s Western Delta, 45 km west of Alexandria and on a branch of the now-drained Lake Mareotis (Mariout), Taposiris Magna was founded and flourished during the Greco-Roman era as a then lakeside harbor town. Its name, Taposiris, is Arabized today as Abusir. The area includes the archaeological sites of the Taposiris temple complex, the village of Plinthine (with a residential and a funerary area), the Abusir lighthouse (reportedly a smaller replica of the lighthouse of Alexandria), as an area of houses, port, and commercial facilities, and a Byzantine church once located near the coast of Lake Mareotis.
Central to the area is the large 4th c.BCE – 2nd c. BCE temple complex connected with the cult of Osiris, which, according to a challenging theory might have been the final resting place of Cleopatra VII. This assumption has led to an extensive exploration in and around the temple area by a joint Dominican-Egyptian project, headed by Dr. K. Martinez. Despite there being no signs of Cleopatra so far, the project which has been active since 2004, has brought to light votive and foundation deposit material from within the temple, cemeteries around it, and a largely submerged underground tunnel hewn very close to the complex s central pylon.
The French team has been active in Taposiris and its nearby Plinthine since 1998 and more actively since 2009, exploring urbanism during the Byzantine-Islamic transitional period of the 7th century CE. Current research focuses on a residential quarter in the heart of the city of Taposiris where, according to a statement on the mission’s official page, it seeks to highlight how “The city’s dynamism at the turn of the Byzantine and Arab-Muslim periods (not forgetting the brief period of Persian domination) and its abandonment a few decades after the conquest provide an ideal field of study for better defining the regional socio-economic issues at stake in the transition between Late Antiquity and the early medieval period”.