LILLE.- Senusret III: Legendary Pharaoh which on view from 9 October to 25 January, at the Palais des Beaux-arts in Lille, France, is the first ever exhibition on the Ancient Egyptian king Senusret III.

The exhibition has been mounted in conjunction with the Louvre Museum. There are also loans from many international museums around the world.

The most powerful of the Middle Kingdom pharaohs, Senusret III is a hugely important figure for Egyptologists and archeologists but not well enough known to the general public. His name should be just as well-known as that of Tutenkhamun, they believe.

The show includes loans from some of the world's greatest collections of Egyptology and, in parallel, contemporary art works inspired by Ancient Egypt from Antony Gormley and Wolfgang Laib.

The wider Nord Pas de Calais region will be continuing the theme of Ancient Egypt when the Louvre-Lens opens a new exhibition on Pharaohs and Animals in December.

• Senusret III was the most powerful Middle Kingdom ruler of his day, with expansionist ambitions; he extended Egypt's southern borders into Nubia in a series of brutal campaigns. His hard-man image gave him the name of "throat-slitter of the Asiatics" and he also shored up the new border by building a series of Nubian fortresses. He personally led troops into battle in Syria and Palestine. He was immensely tall for the time — about 6ft 6in.

• He had the vision to start the first version of the Suez Canal, later completed as the Canal of the Pharaohs, linking the Nile to the Red Sea. He stopped because of fears that the seawater would pollute the Nile, and it wasn't until Ptolemy that a lock gate was invented to stop that happening.

• He was worshipped as a god and seen as a model ruler by generations of his successors

• He was perhaps the first ever ruler to instigate a personality cult, using his own features on statues of himself, rather than the bland and boyish generic pharaohs hitherto. Here are statues with sticking out ears and hollow old cheeks, perhaps communicating the wisdom of age (he ruled for 41 years).

• He invented a professional civil service to replace hereditary administrators

• The wealth and reforms he brought led to a dramatic flowering of monuments, temples, arts and crafts

• He had two burial places — the family pyramid, where it seems he wasn't actually buried, and the first ever 'hidden tomb' (like later ones in the Valley of the Kings) at Abydos, dedicated to the cult of Osiris. Excavations (by Josef Wegner) are still going on at this site: