Measuring about 13 feet long, with a headdress sporting a royal cobra, the upper chunk of the statue of an old Pharaoh, Ramesses II ,lay deep in the Nile-watered earth of Hermopolis Magna. The place, south of Cairo, called Khemu before Rome ruled the Mediterranean , served the ancient Egyptian kingdom for over 500 years (BCE).

In March, Egyptian and US archeology experts found this statue’s torso.

But 1930, German archeologist Günther Roeder first unearthed the lower half, a hulk 23-foot-tall, around El Ashmunein. The statue’s missing part however rendered the find incomplete, and whatever history it held remained unlocked. And Roeders piecing up the evidence he had then to yarn the history would only amount to crap-shooting.

That problem even multiplied when the remaining part turned up first in January, according to Reuters reporting.

First, the excavation site is  close to the Nile River. And the expert team leader  from the University of Colorado Boulder said the building of the Aswan Low Dam made the area’s water table rise, a huge preservation concern. “There was no guarantee that the stone would be OK,” Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, a classics professor, noted in a press statement.

The excavation continued all the same. “We knew it might be there, but we were not specifically looking for it,” he said. “It was a total surprise.”

The team later confirmed the statue’s limestone remains in good form.  Something new even cropped up: traces of blue-and-yellow pigment on the statue’s surface. The researchers will analyse this for further backgrounding and confirmation of the torso’s provenance–or origin.

Back in the days, the Khemu area on the fringe of the deserts hold a lot of the Ramesses 31 dynasties, including their treasures and other arts.

The two parts lie in separate digs within the area now. Basem Gehad, the team’s Egyptian co-leader, has submitted a proposal to reunite the two pieces together.