The remains of a 3,000 year old temple dating from the reign of ancient Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II have been unearthed in the excavations in Upper Egypt's Ehnasia archaeological area. Inside the remains of this temple, excavators uncovered ten cartouches of Ramesses II and beneath them a relief saying that the ruler had built this temple for himself in Ehnasia.

An archeological team has begun uncovering rubble under which the largest known statue of Pharaoh Ramses II is buried in the southern Egyptian town of Sohag. The statue, which workers discovered more than 15 years ago, 476 kilometers miles south of Cairo, is finally being uncovered. The Egyptian team had been hampered in its excavation work, until now, by the presence of a Muslim cemetery in the region of Akhmim across the Nile River from Sohag. Archeologists were finally able to begin their work when bodies from the modern-era cemetery were moved elsewhere.

Egyptian archaeologists located the pink, granite monument at a site in Tell Basta. The great king's nose had been broken and his beard was missing, said Zahi Hawass, the head of the country's supreme council of antiquities. "The discovery is important because it may indicate that the excavators are close to the ruins of a major temple of Ramses II in the area".

The 3,000-year-old relic was thought to have been a female temple dancer, but a hospital CT scan showed features so reminiscent of the Egyptian royal family that experts are 90 per cent sure it is one of the 110 children Ramesses is thought to have fathered. Tests showed that the mummy had a pronounced over-bite and misaligned eyes, akin to members of the 19th Dynasty, and his facial measurements were found to be almost identical to those of Ramesses himself.