Egyptian Museum

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Main entrance of the Egyptian Museum
Main entrance of the Egyptian Museum

The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, known commonly as the Egyptian Museum, in Cairo, Egypt, 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.

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.

[edit] Reference

Egyptian Treasures from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Francesco Tiradritti, editor, Araldo De Luca, photographer. 1999, New York: Abrams ISBN 0810932768. Also published, with variant titles, in Italy and the UK. Reviews, US ed.

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[edit] See also

v • d • e
Museums with major collections of Egyptian antiquities
  1. Egyptian Museum, Cairo
    140,000 objects [1]
  2. British Museum, London
    110,000 objects [2]
  3. Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London
    80,000 objects [3]
  4. Musée du Louvre, Paris
    50,000 objects [4]
  1. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Pennsylvania
    42,000 objects [5]
  2. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
    40,000 objects [6]
  3. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
    36,000 objects [7]
  4. Museo Egizio, Turin
    32,500 objects [8]
  1. Oriental Institute, Chicago:
    30,000 objects [9]
  2. Ägyptisches Museum (Neues Museum), Berlin
    23,000 objects*


* Ancient Egypt, British Museum Press, p. 56. ISBN 0-7141-1950-4
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