Egyptian Museum
Housed behind the neo-Classical exterior of a glowing, fanciful pink building, the legendary Egyptian Museum ranks up with the Pyramids as essential viewing – which means it’s crowded. Tour buses pack the place in the morning. Arriving mid-afternoon and staying until closing time seems to be the best option. If you have the time, two visits are less exhausting than one.
Although not huge as museums go, it’s packed to the gills with amazing artefacts, mainly badly displayed and poorly labelled. Get off the well-trodden ‘highlights’ track and you’ll be lucky to find labels beyond catalogue numbering. But there are discoveries to be made in the dusty wood and glass display cases that look much as they probably did when the museum opened in 1902.
Arranged in roughly chronological order, from around 3000BC through to the Greco-Roman period, there are some genuinely jaw-dropping exhibits.
Here are life-sized and larger statues of pharaohs, great sphinxes, shrines and sarcophagi. Highlights of the Old Kingdom (about 2613BC-2181BC) rooms include a marvellous depiction of pyramid-builder Chephren, seated on a lion throne with the protective wings of Horus, the falcon, cradling his head. An amazingly life-like man, carved from sycamore, the sacred tree, has piercingly real eyes formed from quartz and rock crystal. And can the frieze of Meidun Geese, so often copied today on papyrus paintings, really date back to 2600BC? The Akhenaten Room is important, too, because it shows how in his mere 15-year reign, this king changed not only religion but art styles, too.
Upstairs, the treasure from Tutankhamen’s grave, discovered in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes by Howard Carter in 1922, is the big crowd-puller. Here, at least in the rooms displaying his stunning gold and precious stone death mask and fabulous jewellery, are modern, labelled displays under fibre optic lighting.
The bodies of some of Ancient Egypt’s most illustrious rulers lie in the Royal Mummy Room. I found it disturbing – but as tour guides are not allowed inside, it is relatively peaceful! Don’t miss the gallery displaying Ancient Egyptian jewellery, or the room devoted to Pharaonic Technology.
Admission to the Royal Mummy Room costs £10 and closes at 3pm.
Midan el-Tahrir , Cairo, Egypt
Contact tel: +20 2 579 6974
Cost adult ticket: £5 - £10 pp, child ticket: £1 - £5 pp
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Egyptian Museum
Added 2008/07/03 @ 14:40:32
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