No statues, no obelisks, no temples, nothing to suggest this could once have been home to the ancient world's great lost capital.

"When I came first to this area and to this site, I was shocked. Nothing was to be seen at the surface. No clue where to dig and where to excavate." The region around Qantir is one of the most fertile in Egypt, and it has been so intensively cultivated, all evidence of ancient worlds on the surface has been obliterated. It is the archeological equivalent of a scorched earth.

"When we started to work in this area, every colleague told us, ''You won't find a thing''. Everything is destroyed, nothing is there." And yet somewhere here, amongst these fields, so Pusch and Bietak proposed, lurked the Holy Grail of egyptology, Ramesses II's spectacular lost city of Piramesse.

And so they began to excavate. They were after any clue, however small, that might prove them right. Miraculously , just three days into the dig and only ten centimeters below the surface, Pusch's team found some tantalizing evidence.

These odd carved objects would ultimately turned out to be the first crucial piece of evidence suggesting that Qantir, this uNPRepossessing place, might just be everything they were hoping for. But at the time, no one had a clue what they were. "We didn’t have the slightest idea what they could be. So they were called something like broken fragment of a vase, broken fragment of a dagger, handle or something like this. ''

They kept digging and finding more and more of these mysterious objects, and then they found something rather wonderful. Now this is a real surprising find, a complete set of horse bits, made from bronze, locally produced. The only one ever found in Egypt. It is in such a condition as that it looks like it was made yesterday.