Egyptian Museum – Friday 27 October 2006

We spent a few hours today at the Egyptian museum. It cost 40LE to get into the Museum, which is cheaper than back home, but then it cost us another 100LE to get into see the mummies.

Although like everything else here just getting in the door was challenging… First we had to line up to get in (with the crazy security man pointing us the wrong way) and then again to buy tickets. Once we had our tickets we had to negotiate the obstacle course of ‘guides’ who wanted to help us find our way (for a small fee of course). We made it to the ticket collection gate at which point my hand was stroked and the security man said he loved me… (ahh the trials of being a blue eyed foreigner!). So at this point we’ve spent 20 minutes inside the complex and we can see the door of the museum, but first we have to go through yet another metal detector… I realise that the safety is a good thing, its just a little tiresome. Finally we’re inside the Museum and unlike home there are no maps to show us around (that’s because we’re suppose to pay some dodgy bloke to show us around instead). Lucky for us I brought The Book – the Egypt Lonely Planet has a lovely little tour laid out in it so we followed that… It doesn’t have all the room covered, but enough to get the gist of what is there and why they are important.

The museum has changed a bit since I was there last I think. I can’t remember if we had to buy extra tickets and go through funky glass doors last time to get to the mummies. It took us 3 goes to figure out what was going on and get to the right door. Then we had to scrounge together every last pound we had to raise the 200LE it cost us both to go into see the mummies.

The room the mummies are in are kept at a constant temperature of about 20°c which is lovely after the heat of the rest of the place. Its funny, the mummies don’t look all that impressive until you remind yourself that they are between 3000 and 4000 years old! They just look like skeletons with skin stretched over them… same as you see in the movies. It when you read the little biographies on the bodies that you get kind of awed at the work of people thousands of years ago. They had some seriously clever people back then!

The rest of the museum is really good. The whole place looks like a cross between a warehouse and a gallery. There are sections of stone tablets covered in hieroglyphics positioned as they would have looked back in the day, but held together with boxes and mortar because they are all cracked. Then across from that is a statue in perfect mint condition, as if it was carved yesterday using laser tools, not 3500 years ago using chisels. There are even piece you can touch – run your fingers over the hand of a pharaoh carved 4000 years ago…

Tutankhamun Galleries are impressive mostly because he was pharaoh for such a short time yet everything in the tomb was coated in gold or silver. Kind of makes you wonder what Ramses stuff would have been like... I bet the grave robbers who got that stuff were about to set themselves up.

Anyways, we wandered around for a few hours and checked out all the stuff. They are actually building a new museum out near the pyramids (wont be ready until about 2008). They’ve already moved a statue of Ramses II out there because all the lung chocking pollution is ruining the statues etc. When they are done there will be two museums (they aren’t closing the city one). I think they are going to just split up all the mountains of artefacts that they have accumulated over the last 5000 years!