The Egyptian museum

Location:
Cairo, Egypt

Description:
The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, known commonly as the Egyptian Museum, is home to the most extensive collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities in the world. It has 136,000 items on display, with many more hundreds of thousands in its basement storerooms.
    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 from sites, and protect artifacts. Its Boulaq museum opened in 1858 with a collection assembled by Auguste Mariette, the French archaeologist retained by Isma'il Pasha.                              After residing in an annex of the palace of Isma'il Pasha in Giza from 1880, the museum moved to its present location, a neoclassical structure on Tahrir Square in Cairo's city centre, in 1900 under Gaston Maspero.
    It was built during the reign of Khedive Abbass Helmi II in 1897, and opened on November 15, 1902.  It has 107 halls. At the ground floor there are the huge statues. The upper floor houses small statues, jewels, Tutankhamon treasures and the mummies.
    The highlight of the collection is often considered to be the tomb artifacts of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun, whose almost intact tomb Howard Carter found in the Valley of the Kings in 1923.
    The museum's Royal Mummy Room, containing 27 royal mummies from pharaonic times, was closed down on the orders of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. It was reopened, with a slightly curtailed display of New Kingdom kings and queens, in 1985.
The Museum also comprises a photography section and a large library.

The Egyptian museum comprises many sections arranged in chronological order

  1. The first section houses Tutankhamon’s treasures.
  2. The second section houses the pre-dynasty and the Old Kingdom monuments.
  3. The third section houses the first intermediate period and the Middle Kingdom monuments.
  4. The forth section houses the monuments of the Modern Kingdom.
  5. The fifth section houses the monuments of the late period and the Greek and Roman periods.
  6. The sixth section houses coins and papyrus.
  7. The seventh section houses sarcophagi and scrabs.

    A hall for the royal mummies was opened at the museum, housing eleven kings and queens or more.
    More than a million and half tourists visit the museum annually, in addition to half a million Egyptians.
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