Retired Coins (1) – Atef Motamed

Many, many things have changed in heavily guarded Egypt, some of which have even been retired, including banknotes, especially the half-pound and ten-pound notes.

Half Pound Note

The half-pound note conveys to the ordinary people of our country the features of that resolute man, with his fine face and youthful appearance, holding the scepter of decision close to his chest, in control of affairs.

There was no information in the newspapers about this young man with delicate features. Thirty or forty years ago, no one knew anything about him except coin designers, central bank governors and a few archaeologists.

As knowledge spreads today, we come to understand that this painting is a unique and marvelous statue in the Egyptian land, a statue of King Ramses II in his youth with a war helmet on his head in place of a civil crown, and holding a scepter that performs several functions, including being ready to strike violators and enemies with an iron fist.

The half-pound note hides the rest of the statue, which is considered a marvel of ancient Egyptian art, showing Ramses II seated on a throne, his body in perfect shape and his artistic expression astonishing.

The rock from which the statue was carved is also unique, and geologists call it “granodiorite,” a double word in which the rock combines some characteristics of “granodiorite” and “granite,” with some characteristics of “diorite.”

Ramses II, who ruled Egypt 3200 years ago, chose one of the oldest crustal rocks in Egypt. True, the artists of his time knew that this rock was very old, but they certainly did not imagine that it was as old as today’s historians say, average. The age of the formation of this rock on Egyptian land is about 8 million years!

More than a thousand years after the reign of Ramses II, when the Romans conquered Egypt and got something more precious than gold, diorite granite was unique and unrivaled in all the Roman colonies in Europe and Asia, and then they Romans saw it as an ideal source for making columns for the Roman royal palace, the Romans recruited the Egyptians to cut the granodiorite and drag it from the depths of the eastern desert of Egypt to Quina on the banks of the Nile, and then from Quina across the river to Alexandria. From the latter to Rome, there still remains the brightest and most beautiful squares and palaces of that era.

Among the mines that fascinated the Roman emperors was a famous mountain in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, west of the port of Safaga, which a great Roman emperor, Emperor Claudius, named after himself today. The mountain contained several types of granite, including granodiorite, so he called it “Mons Claudianus”, which means “Mons Claudianus”. The name of Emperor Claudius Mountain remains on Egyptian maps to this day.

One of the wonders of this diorite granite is that it is the same rock from which the Rosetta Stone was cut, which was the key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian language.

Because our great country is a land of paradoxes, surprises and contradictions, if you look for the statue of Ramses II on the half pound note, you will find it in the “Egyptian Museum”.

You probably didn’t notice the deception because the Egyptian Museum in question is not the Cairo Museum, but the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, which I sarcastically call “Ali Baba’s Gold Cave”, which contains thousands of looted and stolen Egyptian artifacts. They began to come to Italy since the time of Muhammad Ali Pasha, who had no interest in antiquities and did not take care of them, but instead allowed Bernardino Drovetti, the Italian-French consul and great expert in looted antiquities, to transport the thousands of pieces that now adorn three museums in Europe, the largest, the biggest and the most magnificent of which is the “Egyptian Museum” in Turin.

When the half pound note was designed and revered, it seemed to make up for the absence of the original statue in Turin, Italy. Now both are missing: the actual statue, and a whiff of its image… or a glimpse of what it might have looked like.

Ten Pound Note

They say the ten pound note flies so fast that we can’t see what’s on it or understand the meaning of its image.

The ten-pound note has two sides: the “Islam” side is written in Arabic and has a picture of the famous Cairo mosque, while the other side, which we see in this article, is written in English and has a picture of a famous mosque. The statue is of one of the most famous kings of ancient Egypt, owner of the second pyramid, who ruled our country 4,500 years ago during the Fourth Dynasty: King Khafra.

The statue, currently located in the Egyptian Museum, is uniquely designed, with the god Horus as a falcon circling Khafra’s head from behind, firmly and resolutely guiding his steps, as if he were leading his advance, directly embodying the authority of heaven (Lord) and the authority of earth (Ruler).

The famous statue of Khafra was carved from red-hot rock that erupted from the burning magma inside the earth. Geologists have different elemental analyses of it, classifying it as “diorite” and “gneiss.”

It is really strange that the Egyptian King Khafra, the cradle of the ancient Egyptian state, these rocks are the oldest on Egyptian land, estimated to be 800-900 million years old. As for the gneisses, they are the oldest rocks on Egyptian land. These rocks appeared on Egyptian land with the beginning of the formation of the earth’s crust in our country, and indeed the formation of the earth’s crust. Distributed throughout Africa, their number is unimaginable for non-specialists, since the age of these rocks dates back at least 1.7 billion years.

The second odd thing about the gneisses is that they are not found all over Egypt, but only in certain areas of influence and in latitudes south of Egypt.

Khafre built the second pyramid at Giza and most likely the Sphinx. He didn’t have any diorite or gneiss in his immediate northern Egypt, which was overrun with weak limestone, sand, and shale. Where did this unique rock come from?

4,500 years ago, Egyptian geologists and geographers discovered a rare mountain range in the Nubian region on their geological maps, located west of today’s Abu Simbel, known as the “Mountain of Times.”

In that region, Egypt’s southernmost tip, sculptors carved huge rocks and erected many statues of Khafre in them, including the one that appears on the ten-pound note.

The third thing that will surprise you is that today the world’s leading tectonic geologists believe that the land of Egypt was formed by a set of arch structures that were more like a spine around which the rest of the “flesh and fat” of the Egyptian land grew. Among these structural arches on the spine of Egypt there is a famous arch that they gave the name “Chephren”, which is the English word for the name “Khafre”, meaning that the rock of his statue was uprooted from western Nubia.

Imagine if the ten pound note slowed down just a little bit, we would know all this information, and how could it possibly slow down when it has completely disappeared from view since last year?