EGYPTIAN FARMER DIGS UP YARD, HITS 28-FOOT PHARAOH STATUE

Khaled el-Shahat was working the patch of land in front of his house in Behbeit el-Hagar, a village in Egypt's Nile Delta, when he hit an inscribed stone block. He reported it to local antiquities officials. Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities sent a team for a rescue dig and came back up with two colossal royal statues and a pink granite block covered in hieroglyphs. The first find is a head measuring about 1.6 meters on its own, roughly 5 foot 2. Working backward from that, SCA secretary-general Hisham El-Leithy's team estimates the complete statue stood around 8.5 meters, about 28 feet including the base. The pharaoh wears the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Part of the back pillar carries his Horus name, Hor-Ka-Nakht-Mery-Maat, which translates to Strong Bull, Beloved of Truth. The granite block nearby adds two more titles, King of Upper and Lower Egypt and Son of Ra. The man found three separate ways to sign the same field. The second statue is a head and torso in the striped nemes headdress, legs and base gone, and the face resembles the first closely enough that researchers think it's him again. Ramesses II ruled roughly 66 years, from about 1279 to 1213 B.C., and spent a healthy chunk of it commissioning himself. Fragments with his name had turned up at the site before, but this scale suggests something monumental stood here centuries before the famous Temple of Isis went up.

Why you should give a shit: A farmer called the antiquities office instead of a smuggler, and Egypt got hard evidence that Behbeit el-Hagar was hosting 28-foot pharaohs centuries before the temple everybody actually came to see.