Show me the mummies! Show ME the mummies!

This morning I have spent most of my time wandering around the Egyptian museum, which is literally only a stone’s throw away from the hotel.

The building is absolutely massive, and is a bureaucratic nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions. First of all you have to queue in a slowly moving line to have your bag checked for any unauthorised materials (i.e. bombs and the like), then you have to queue in another line in order to get your ticket. After getting your ticket, you then have to queue in a line in order to get into the museum, then having gone through the turnstiles, you queue in another line while your bag is X-rayed again, in order to make doubly sure you are not bringing anything in. Finally, after that, you are allowed in, although there is a queue for you to check in bags and cameras too, should you wish (I declined).

Some of the exhibits outside the museum, no cameras
are allowed inside, so I can't show you Tut's headdress

The museum collections are on two floors, the old kingdoms on the ground floor and the new kingdoms on the upper floor. The new kingdom stuff has all the sarcophagi and Egyptian mummies in it, along with the Tutankhamun collection. I knew from the outset that this was too big a job to do in the one day, and so I had already determined to split it into a two day exercise; day one would tackle the upper floor taking in the mummies and Tutankhamun's hoard and on day two I would look at the old kingdom stuff, which is less "pottery" and "trinkety" based and more "large statue" based.

The whole museum is a cornucopia of exhibits arranged higgledy-piggledy wherever there appears to be space for them. They claim that there are over 600,000 exhibits on display, and apparently there are many more in storage that they do not have the space to display (they are building a multi-million pound purpose built museum for all this near the Pyramids, but it is not opening until 2011). Anyway, I expected the museum to be totally heaving, but it was not so, and I could walk around looking at all of the sarcophagi in relative peace and quiet. Further investigation made me conclude that the people visiting the museum can be generalised into 2 groups; those who are with a tour guide and those who are on their own but choose to head straight to the Tutankhamun death mask.

The tour groups all seemed to converge on the same places of the museum at the same time, creating bedlam as the guides all try and outshout each other. I chose not to go with a tour guide, I like to take my time on museum viewing and so I was always viewing different parts of the museum to the tours, which meant I didn’t have to fight to squeeze in and see an exhibit at all.

Like I said, the new kingdom stuff (by which I mean the period from about 1300BC to 400AD) is very trinkety based, and so instead of showing one lapis lazuli figure of Amun, the museum displays several hundred which, while interesting, is a bit of overkill in my opinion. However, that said, with there being so many exhibits, the visitors are given a thorough glimpse into Egyptian life at the time; clothing, weaponry, jewellery, tools, furniture, you name it, it is here.

One of my favourite rooms was the mummified animals, which had mummified crocodiles, similar to the ones I saw in Kom Ombo, only considerably bigger. The Egyptians practiced mummification techniques out on animals in order to perfect the art, when it came to mummifying pharaohs.

At the end of each hall, is a special room which houses the mummified remains of the pharaohs. There was a separate charge to come and see this, and so once again there was a queue! The mummies though are well worth going to see (a trip to the museum without visiting them would be sacrilege). As with inside of the tombs, there was no photography allowed in this museum – and they are very strict about it – I went to get my phone out to check the time and I was pulled over to the side by a plain clothes guard and told in no uncertain terms - “no photos - no camera, no mobile phone”. I appreciate that flash photography could ruin the colouring on some of the exhibits, but I am not sure of the reasoning for stopping non-flash photography, apart from it being an attempt to make you buy the guide books etc.

Anyway, I wandered around the floor in a logical order (which took about 3 hours in total) until I got to the Tutankhamun Room. It was, as I suspected, very busy but not manically so, and in the middle was the signature headdress of the boy-king himself. I have to say that it was a VERY impressive piece of artisanship! Also in the room are two more gold coffins which he was buried in.

Outside this room are all of the other items found during the excavation of his tomb, and there is a massive amount of items there. In terms of historical significance, Tutankhamun is actually quite a minor figure in Egyptian history, it is purely the fact that his tomb was practically untouched by grave robbers (because no one knew it was there!) that made him so special. Looking at the finds in his tomb, it does make you wonder how impressive the finds in the other tombs would have been had they been untouched.

So, that is the upper floor of the museum covered; tomorrow I will go back and tackle the lower floor (and possibly pop back and see the death mask again, as it is such an iconic piece). Tonight I have booked myself on a Sound and Light show for the Pyramids, so I will give an update on how that went (it is another scene from the Spy who Loved Me) later on.