Cairo Museum

[Danielle Gorree]

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 120,000 items, with a representative amount on display, the remainder in storerooms.

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.

[Danielle Gorree]

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.

When Auguste Mariette Moved with his family to Cairo, his career blossomed into a chronicle of unwearying exploration and brilliant successes: gaining government funds to set up the Bulaq Museum (or Bulak Museum) in 1863 in order to take the pressure off the sites and stop the trade in illicit antiquities.

The Bulaq museum was flooded leading to move of the collection to different sites. This led to the building of the present museum , which was officially inaugurated on November 15, 1902, The building was designed by French architect Marcel Dourgnon

[Danielle Gorree]

Akenaton image

[Danielle Gorree]

[Danielle Gorree]

[Danielle Gorree]

[Danielle Gorree]

[Danielle Gorree]

[Danielle Gorree]

Ataud encontrado en KV55

[Danielle Gorree]

[Danielle Gorree]

Djer stela

[Danielle Gorree]

Statue of Djoser in Cairo Museum. This statue was originally in the serdab in the step pyramid complex.

[Danielle Gorree]

[Danielle Gorree]

Egyptian god ; statuette in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

[Danielle Gorree]

Antique papyrus, showing the god Osiris and the weighing of the heart.