Cairo/Egyptian Museum
From World travel guide
The Egyptian Museum (officially, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities) in Midan Tahrir in Cairo, the capital city of Egypt, is one of the world's great museums. An extensive building and massive collection of Egyptian antiquities, the Museum (also commonly referred to as the "Cairo Museum") is truly a destination in its own right.
Plans are now well advanced for the transfer of the main collection to a new Grand Egyptian Museum within the vicinity of the Giza Pyramids. In the meantime, this article will serve as a convenient guide to what can be a confusing environment - not merely on account of its size, but also for the current, still poorly-labelled and -documented nature of many prime exhibits.
Contents |
Understand
The Egyptian Museum has at least 136,000 items on display; hundreds of thousands of additional items languish in the museum's basement storerooms and are added to each year with ongoing excavation and discovery.
The museum is an outgrowth of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, established by the Egyptian government in 1835, in an attempt to limit the looting of antiquities sites and artefacts. The museum first officially opened in 1858 with a collection assembled by Auguste Mariette Pasha, the French archaeologist employed by Isma'il Pasha to organise the collection. After residing in an annex of the Bulaq palace of Ismail Pasha in Giza from 1880, the museum moved in 1900 to its present location, a neoclassical structure on Tahrir Square in Cairo's city centre.
Get in
Admission: adults LE 40, children LE 20
See
Building and Grounds
Highlights
- Objects from the Tomb of Tutankhamun, Upper Floor - discovered in 1922 and gradually revealed over the next few years, many of the objects from the tomb of the "boy king" were brought to the Egyptian Museum for display. A small number of objects found their way into foreign collections, whilst several - including the inner sarcophagus and the body of Tutankhamun himself - remained in the small tomb in the Valley of the Kings. NB: A significant number of items from the Tutankhamun collection are currently on tour to museums in Europe and North America.
- the Royal Mummies, Upper Floor, separate admission charge of LE 70, no photography allowed - many of the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom period and later are dispayed here in person...
- the Narmer Palette, Entrance Lobby
Do
Research
Guided Tours
Buy
A bookstore and several small gift stores are open during museum hours within the main entrance hall to the museum. Note that the prices are often somewhat inflated. Be careful also that the proprieters do not pass on a dusty, grimy equivalent of the display copy you think you are purchasing....
External links
- the Egyptian Museum - official web site
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