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Khaled el-Shahat Khalil was not looking for a pharaoh. He was growing cucumbers inside a greenhouse on a plot of land in front of his house in Behbeit el-Hagar, a village in Egypt's Nile Delta, when his tools hit something hard: a block of pink stone carved with hieroglyphs. He stopped digging and called the antiquities authorities. What they pulled out of the ground has become one of the most striking archaeological finds of 2026: the head of a colossal statue of Ramses II, one of ancient Egypt's most famous kings, with the full monument estimated at about 28 feet tall.
Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery in mid-October 2026, after a rescue excavation at the site. The details, confirmed by multiple independent outlets, are even better than the first headlines suggested.
What the archaeologists actually found
The centrepiece is a carved stone head of Ramses II wearing the double crown, the Pschent, which symbolised the king's rule over Upper and Lower Egypt. The head alone measures about 1.6 metres (5.25 feet) tall. From its proportions, Hisham el-Leithy, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, estimated that the complete statue, including its base, would once have stood about 8.5 metres — roughly 28 feet — tall. Only the head and the upper end of the statue's back pillar have been recovered so far; nobody has measured a standing figure. The surviving part of the back pillar carries one of the king's royal names, which is how archaeologists tied the fragment to Ramses II.
About a metre away, the team found a second statue fragment, roughly 2.4 metres long, preserving a well-preserved face framed by the striped nemes headcloth, and a pink granite block about 1.3 metres long carved with the royal titles "King of Upper and Lower Egypt" and "Son of Ra". Officials say the second statue is most likely also Ramses II — but that identification is provisional, and further study is needed to confirm it.
Why Behbeit el-Hagar matters
The village sits in the Gharbia Governorate, roughly 110 kilometres north of Cairo and about 10 kilometres northwest of the town of Samannoud. It is best known for the ruins of the Iseion, a major temple dedicated to Isis. Temples like that one drew royal monuments for centuries, and the ground around them is still giving up pieces of that history — sometimes to the people farming directly above it. This is a different find from the famous 2017 Ramses II statue pulled from groundwater in Cairo's Matariya district: a different place, a farmer's tip, and a rescue dig.
Who was Ramses II?
Ramses II ruled Egypt from about 1279 to 1213 BC, a reign of roughly 66 years that made him one of the longest-ruling and most prolific builders among the pharaohs. His monuments still stand across Egypt, from Abu Simbel to the Ramesseum, and his name turns up wherever archaeologists dig. The statue uncovered at Behbeit el-Hagar was carved more than 3,200 years ago.
Ramses is also often linked in popular writing to the unnamed pharaoh of the biblical Exodus story — a connection scholars dispute, which the Bible itself never makes explicit, and which these statues do nothing to settle. What they do establish is simpler: a royal workshop, a temple town, and a king whose image was still being carved in stone three millennia ago.
The farmer's reward
Most farm chores do not end with a visit from a government minister. On 14 October, Tourism and Antiquities Minister Sherif Fathy travelled to Khalil's village in person, accompanied by the Gharbia governor and senior antiquities officials, to thank him. The minister presented Khalil and his wife with certificates of appreciation — and a fully sponsored trip to Saudi Arabia to perform Umrah, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The reward was for something simple: Khalil reported the stone instead of keeping it, digging it up himself, or selling it. In a statement quoted by CBS News, the ministry said the minister insisted the farmer be honoured "in his village, on his own land, and among his family and fellow villagers, in recognition of his honesty, awareness, and sense of responsibility."
What is still unanswered
For all the headlines, several questions are open. The second statue's identity is still provisional — the ministry's own wording is that it is "also believed to represent" Ramses II, and that has not been confirmed. Nor has the ministry connected the two statues to the nearby Isis temple: the temple is famous, the statues were found beside it, but officials have not said the statues stood there. Excavation and study are continuing on Khalil's land, and the authorities plan to restore the fragments and display them in a major museum once the analysis and documentation are complete. The next pieces the dig turns up may show whether the two colossal figures once stood together or marked different points in the temple complex.
What happens next
The ministry says study of the pieces is still going on. The open questions are whether the second statue is confirmed as Ramses II, what else the rescue excavation turns up around the Isis temple, and where the head will eventually be displayed. The farmer was publicly honoured by the tourism and antiquities minister, Sherif Fathy — a reminder that in Egypt, the next great discovery is as likely to come from a cucumber field as from a formal excavation trench.
Like the moon-like rock found in Madagascar and the transparent-headed barreleye fish filmed in the deep sea, this is a story about how much of the world is still waiting to be noticed — sometimes by the person least expecting to find it. A farmer saw a pink stone, made a phone call, and gave archaeologists a pharaoh.
Sources: earth.com; The Economic Times; see.news.