00:00After two decades of restoration, these huge statues of Amenhotep III are back where they belong, at the king's mortuary temple in Luxor.
00:11They were unveiled at a ceremony on Sunday.
00:15Known as the Colossae of Memnon, they represent the prominent pharaoh who ruled ancient Egypt in the 14th century BCE,
00:23during the country's prosperous and peaceful New Kingdom period.
00:27The statues in the funerary temple were toppled by a powerful earthquake some 1,200 years ago.
00:35When they found actually those statues, they found it separated in very fragmentary conservation state.
00:45And of course, they have to work on it for more than 19 years in order to put everything together,
00:54in order to collect all several pieces.
00:57And today we are celebrating actually the finishing and erecting of these two close statues,
01:04that it will add a lot to the Luxor in general and to the funerary temple of the king,
01:11trying to revive how this funerary temple of King Amenhotep III looked like a long time ago.
01:18The Colossae preside over the king's temple, a 35-hectare complex on the western banks of the Nile.
01:27It's thought to be the largest and richest temple in Egypt and is often compared to the temple of Karnak, also in Luxor.
01:35In the late 1990s, an Egyptian-German mission began working in the temple area,
01:43including the reassembly and renovation of the Colossae.
01:47This project has in mind, and I hope we fulfilled not only what we had projected, our project, but our dreams also,
01:58to save the last remains of a once prestigious temple.
02:02It was the largest of all.
02:04With the statues back where they belong, officials hope they'll attract new visitors
02:09and help revive the country's tourism sector that's suffered since the 2011 uprising and COVID-19 pandemic.
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