Arab News Japan

TOKYO: The “Ramses the Great: the Gold of the Pharaohs” exhibition will head to Tokyo in the spring of 2025.

The Tokyo stop for the wildly popular exhibition was announced at a press conference in Tokyo on Friday.

The exhibition presents the life, reign, and legacy of one of the greatest builders of ancient Egypt. It contains more than 180 artefacts from the Egyptian Museum collections, including sarcophagi, statues, gold and silverware, and the restored funerary mask of Egyptian Pharaoh Amenemope.

Some of the artefacts are over 3,000 years old and are being exhibited for the first-time outside Egypt.

The exhibition will include a film that presents a detailed exploration of the life of King Ramses and the famous rediscovery in 1881 of a hidden cache in the Theban necropolis in which Ramses and several other royal mummies were found. The exhibition will also offer a virtual reality tour of the fabulous temple of Abu Simbel and the tomb of Nefertari.

Ramses Il was a pharaoh of the 19th dynasty of Egypt who extended the sphere of influence of the New Kingdom of Egypt by building numerous massive structures across the country to honor the gods and his own achievements. He was the longest-reigning pharaoh of all the pharaohs in Egypt.

The exhibition’s global curator Zahi Hawass, former Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and former Minister of State for Antiquities came to the press conference to describe the exhibition’s theme and content. The press conference was also attended by Egyptian Ambassador Mohamed Abubakr.

“We are really delighted to have the Ramses II Exhibition here next year,” Abubakr said. “It is the largest ever for artifacts from Egypt.”

The exhibition’s tour started off in Houston in 2021, before heading to San Francisco, Paris, and Sydney. Its next stop will be in Cologne, Germany, before heading to Japan in 2025.