The tall figure was barely visible at first as it lay sideways in a muddy pit between two apartment buildings in northeast Cairo.
But as the sewage water was drained away and the dirt scraped off, the onlookers in the working class neighbourhood began to make out a recognisably royal frame.
And then - just a few yards from where women hang their family’s laundry and vendors sell street food - emerged a towering statue of what is believed to be Egypt’s most famous pharaoh.
The 26-foot tall figure is probably Ramses the Great, the most powerful ruler of ancient Egypt and the inspiration for Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, about the “colossal wreck” of a once-mighty king.
The quartzite statue was found broken into several pieces in the Matariyyah neighborhood of Cairo by a German-Egyptian archaeological team, which first discovered the chest before locating its jaw and then eventually its crown.
The top of the crown, which is the height of a child, was so large it had to be packed in mud and lifted out of the ditch with an excavator before it could be cleaned.
“Everyone is really surprised at the scale of the statue,” said Nigel Hetherington, a British Egyptologist. “I don’t think anyone realised how dramatic it would look and there may still be more to come.”
A life-size statue of Seti II, Ramses’ grandson, was also discovered at the site. Although much smaller than the other statue, experts said the limestone work showed fine artistic detail.
The discovery amazed both the archaeological community and the residents of Matariyyah, who gathered to gawk and take selfies with the 3,000-year-old statue that was buried just beneath their feet.
Their neighbourhood was built over the site of the ancient city of Heliopolis, a religious area dedicated to the worship of the sun god Re. Ramses built a sun temple bearing his own name in the area, suggesting that the statue is probably of him.
"The sun god created the world in Heliopolis,” said Dietrich Raue, the head of German team. “That's what I always tell the people here when they say is there anything important. According to the pharaonic belief, the world was created in Matariyyah.”
Ramses is thought to have ruled Egypt for 66 years from 1279BC and vastly extended his empire through a series of military campaigns into modern-day Israel and Sudan. He is sometimes referred to as “The Great Ancestor”.
His name in Greek transliterates as Ozymandias and the arrival in London of a large statue of him is believed to have inspired Shelley’s 1818 sonnet and its most famous line: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Many Egyptians despaired on social media when they saw photographs of the statue being lifted from the earth with heavy construction equipment and rumours soon swirled that the heavy-handed digging had broken the newly-discovered statue.
But experts were quick to vouch for the practices of the German-Egyptian team, who were operating in difficult conditions amid sewage water and apartment blocs built without formal planning permission.
“It seems the statue was not broken during the operation as some people feared,” said Monica Hanna, an Egyptology expert.
However, she raised concerns that previous Egyptian authorities had examined the area and declared it to be of no archaeological interest, instead giving vendors of the nearby Thursday Market permission to set up shop in the area.
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