Washington: Archaeologists have found a massive one ton granite statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Taharqa has been found in Dangeil, deep inside Sudan.
Taharqa was a pharaoh of the 25th dynasty of Egypt. This was a period of Kushite rule, which means that Taharqa and his fellow rulers were from Nubia and drew their power-base from there.
According to a report in the Heritage Key, the site where the statue of the pharaoh was discovered is located approximately 350 km northeast of the modern Sudanese capital of Khartoum – in the general vicinity of the fifth Nile cataract.
In addition to Taharqa, archaeologists have found statues of two other Napatan kings at the site - Senkamanisken and Aspelta, neither of whom controlled Egypt.
The announcement of the discovery was made on the blog of Dr Caroline Rocheleau of the Royal Ontario Museum North Carolina Museum of Art.
In her blog Dr Rocheleau describes the Taharqa statue as, “more than life-size and weighs over one ton.”
The Taharqa and Senkamanisken statues have “great muscular bodies with an inscribed back pillar... and lovely feet on the statue base, but we are missing their heads and their lower legs.”
ANI
First Published: Friday, January 01, 2010, 15:52