Alexandria, and the French Minister of Education and Religious Affairs, Hippolyte Fortoul. During the transportation to the Sidon port, the citizens and the governor of Sidon gathered, escorted, and applauded the convoy; they adorned the sarcophagus with flowers and palm branches while 20 oxen, assisted by French sailors, dragged its carriage to the port. At the wharf, the crew of the French navy corvette La Sérieuse boarded the sarcophagus' trough, and then its lid onto a barge, before lifting it to the military corvette. The corvette commander, Delmas De La Perugia read out an early translation of the inscriptions and explained the scientific importance and historical significance of the cargo to his crew. The sarcophagus of King Eshmunazar II is housed in the Louvre's Near Eastern antiquities section in room 311 of the Sully wing. It was given the museum identification number of AO 4806. Description The Egyptian anthropoid-style sarcophagus dates to the 6th-century BC, it is made of a solid, well polished block of bluish-black amphibolite. It measures long, wide, and high. The lid displays a relief carving of the figure of a deceased person in the style of the Egyptian mummy sarcophagi. The effigy of the deceased is portrayed smiling, wrapped up to the neck in a thick shroud, leaving the head uncovered. The effigy is dressed with a large Nubian wig, a false braided beard, and an Usekh collar ending with falcon heads at each of its extremities, as is often seen at the neck of Egyptian mummies. Two other sarcophagi of the same style were also unearthed in the Sidon necropolis. Inscriptions The Egyptian-style sarcophagus was free from hieroglyphs, but it had 22 lines of 40 to 55 letters each of Phoenician text on its lid instead. The lid inscriptions occupy a square situated under the sarcophagus' Usekh collar and measure in length and width. A second inscription, carved in more delicate and uniformly carved Phoenician characters than the first, was found around the curvature of the head on the trough of the sarcophagus. It measures in length and consists of six lines and a fragment of a seventh line. As is customary for Phoenician writing, all the characters are written without spaces separating each word except for a space in line 13 of the lid inscription, which divides the text into two equal parts. The letters are not evenly spaced, ranging from no distance to