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Exhibition Dedicated to 'Ramses II' Lures over 800,000 Visitors in France

The wooden coffin of Pharaoh Ramses II is on display Thursday, April 6, 2023 in Paris. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
The wooden coffin of Pharaoh Ramses II is on display Thursday, April 6, 2023 in Paris. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
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Exhibition Dedicated to 'Ramses II' Lures over 800,000 Visitors in France

The wooden coffin of Pharaoh Ramses II is on display Thursday, April 6, 2023 in Paris. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
The wooden coffin of Pharaoh Ramses II is on display Thursday, April 6, 2023 in Paris. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)

An exhibition dedicated to ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, which concluded on Sunday in Paris, lured over 800,000 visitors since its opening five months ago. The curators of the traveling exhibition announced Tuesday that it’s next stop is Sydney, Australia.

Dubbed “Ramses the Great and the Gold of the Pharaohs”, the exhibition debuted in San Francisco in 2022, and it is set to land in Australia, this fall. Among several hosting countries, France was the only one to exhibit Ramses II’s sarcophagus “without a mummy”.

Since its launch in Paris in early April, 817,036 people visited the exhibition, mostly French, in addition to Belgians, Swiss, and Germans.

In 2019, the “Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh” exhibition in Paris, was successful as well, hosting a record number of visitors, estimated at 1.42 million, according to Agence France Press (AFP).

Usually, the sarcophagus of Ramses II is exhibited at Cairo’s National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC), and it didn’t left Egypt for 45 years.

But Ramses II’s sarcophagus was displayed in Paris alongside an array of 180 ancient artifacts including jewelry and statues, many of which had never before left Egypt.

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Explorer: Sonar Image Was Rock Formation, Not Amelia Earhart Plane

A statue of Amelia Earhart at the US Capitol. Nathan Howard / GETTY IMAGES/AFP
A statue of Amelia Earhart at the US Capitol. Nathan Howard / GETTY IMAGES/AFP
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Explorer: Sonar Image Was Rock Formation, Not Amelia Earhart Plane

A statue of Amelia Earhart at the US Capitol. Nathan Howard / GETTY IMAGES/AFP
A statue of Amelia Earhart at the US Capitol. Nathan Howard / GETTY IMAGES/AFP

A sonar image suspected of showing the remains of the plane of Amelia Earhart, the famed American aviatrix who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937, has turned out to be a rock formation.

Deep Sea Vision (DSV), a South Carolina-based firm, released the blurry image in January captured by an unmanned submersible of what it said may be Earhart's plane on the seafloor.

Not so, the company said in an update on Instagram this month, AFP reported.

"After 11 months the waiting has finally ended and unfortunately our target was not Amelia's Electra 10E (just a natural rock formation)," Deep Sea Vision said.

"As we speak DSV continues to search," it said. "The plot thickens with still no evidence of her disappearance ever found."

The image was taken by DSV during an extensive search in an area of the Pacific to the west of Earhart's planned destination, remote Howland Island.

Earhart went missing while on a pioneering round-the-world flight with navigator Fred Noonan.

Her disappearance is one of the most tantalizing mysteries in aviation lore, fascinating historians for decades and spawning books, movies and theories galore.

The prevailing belief is that Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, ran out of fuel and ditched their twin-engine Lockheed Electra in the Pacific near Howland Island while on one of the final legs of their epic journey.

Earhart, who won fame in 1932 as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, took off on May 20, 1937 from Oakland, California, hoping to become the first woman to fly around the world.

She and Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937 after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on a challenging 2,500-mile (4,000-kilometer) flight to refuel on Howland Island, a speck of a US territory between Australia and Hawaii.

They never made it.