On September 26th 1976 a plane landed in the airport of the military base in Bourget, in France. On land everything was ready to give to the head of the state a proper welcome. The very particular passenger came down from the hold instead of the stairs: it was Ramses’s mummy. Found in 1881 from the Egyptolist Maspero and since then, kept in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the mummy, that thanks to the embalming had overcome the threats of time for three-thousand years, had begum to show signs of a rapid deterioration. To save it, in the Muses de l’Homme, in Paris, a laboratory with the most saphisticated research system was established. About 120 among the most exert in various disciplines were called, whose only commard was to preserve what remained of the great pharaoh’s mortal remains. For seven months his body was kept in an air-conditioned room at 19° and with 55% of humidity. It was moved only for short periods necessary for accurate analysis. It was then discovered that the cause of what was happening was the daedalea biemis fries fungus: as the cause was foun, the danger was avoided with the use of gamut rays produced by cobalt 60, that sterilized successfully the mummy. During the stay of the mummy in Paris, the scientists put it under complicated exams: radiography, endoscopy and xerography.
The results gave another light to the last years of this pharaoh’s life, allowing to sketch a frame that confirm his legend and humanizes him. In fact, we know Ramses was taller than the average of the epoch (about one meter and 72 cm), that he was chestnut and had lightly alive skin, and that he died over eighty years old, for a general infection. At the end of his long life, he was rather in bad shape.
His mouth was swined with teeth decay and by a strong paradontite. The bone showed clear signs of a rheumatic arthritis anchilosante of the spinal colums, that fonced him to a crippled pace and to the use of a walking – stick, besides immobilizing almost his whole neck and ching, that was bent over his chest..The head of the mummy, perfectly straight, must have been straightened after the sovereign’s death. It’s probable, in fact, that the embalmers broke the fifth and the sixth cervical vertebra to remove the brain through the nose and pour the hot resin necessary to fill the skull, according the procedure of the mummification. After the odyssey of treatments and studies, Ramses was finally wrapped up again in bandages, put back in the sarcophagus and returned to the Museum in Cairo, to continue his eternal sleep.