Sandstone Lintel of Ramesses II Unearthed at Tell Abu Saifi, Bolstering Case for Lost City of Msen
A large sandstone lintel inscribed with the titles of King Ramesses II has been unearthed at Tell Abu Saifi, an archaeological site in the Ismailia Governorate of northern Egypt, according to reporting by ARTnews on 17 August 2026.
The lintel, broken into two pieces, carries inscriptions on three sides. One text refers to restoration work on a statue, Heritage Daily reported on 16 August. Ramesses II ruled Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE and was one of the most prolific builders of the Pharaonic era, which makes the discovery of his royal titulary on a structural element at this site significant for archaeologists tracing the ancient landscape of the eastern Nile Delta.
Tell Abu Saifi sits at Qantara East, a location that places it squarely on the route of the Way of Horus — an ancient military road that in antiquity connected Egypt with the Mediterranean Levant, the coastal region covering modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine. Daily News Egypt reported the connection on 15 August. The road was the principal artery for Egyptian military campaigns heading north-east into Canaan and beyond, and its fortresses and waystations dotted the delta's edge.
The 2026 excavation season at Tell Abu Saifi provides fresh evidence for two things at once: the original route of the Way of Horus and the existence of a lost Pharaonic city known as Msen, according to Heritage Daily and La Brújula Verde. Msen has been hypothesised from textual references but has never been conclusively located on the ground. The new finds at Tell Abu Saifi, including the Ramesses II lintel, strengthen the argument that the site and its surroundings hold the city's remains.
A lintel — the horizontal beam spanning the top of a doorway — bearing a king's titles would typically have sat above the entrance to a temple or an important administrative building. Its presence, along with the reference to statue restoration, points to monumental architecture and royal investment at the site during or after Ramesses II's reign.
For archaeologists, the attraction of Tell Abu Saifi is that a single site appears to be answering two questions at once: where the Way of Horus actually ran, and whether Msen was a real city or a textual phantom. Each inscribed stone pulled from the sand tightens the link between the military road and the settlement that serviced it.
