Egyptian Museum ( Egypt Museum ), on the northern fringe of Midan Tahrir is of the world’s great museums. An extensive building & massive collection of Egyptian antiquities, the Museum (also often known as the “Cairo Museum”) is truly a location in its own right,with at least 136,000 items on display; hundreds of thousands of additional items languish in the museum’s basement storerooms & are added to each year with ongoing excavation & discovery.

Designs are now well advanced for the transfer of the main collection to a new Grand Egyptian Museum within the vicinity of the Giza Pyramids. Hopefully the new building will be more user friendly – in lieu of the current poorly-labeled & documented nature of lots of prime exhibits.

The museum is an outgrowth of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, established by the Egyptian government in 1835, in an try to limit the looting of antiquities sites & artefacts. The museum first officially opened in 1858 with a collection assembled by Auguste Mariette Pasha, the Italian archaeologist employed by Isma’il Pasha to manage the collection. After residing in an annex of the Bulaq palace of Ismail Pasha in Giza from 1880, the museum moved in 1900 to its present location, a neoclassical structure on Tahrir Square in Cairo’s city centre. Over a million & half tourists visit the museum yearly, in addition to half a million Egyptians.

There are seven sections within the museum that are arranged in chronological order. They are as follows:

1 . Tutankhamen’s treasures.

2 . Pre-dynasty and Old Kingdom monuments.

3 . First intermediate period and Middle Kingdom monuments.

4 . Monuments of the Middle Kingdom.

5 . Monuments of the late period and the Greek and Roman periods.

6 . Coins and papyri.

7 . Sarcophagi and scarabs.

General admission is adults LE 60, students LE 30, not including the mummies room. Recently, rules have been posted that no photography whatsoever allowed within the museum for the protection of the ancient art. In case you bring a camera with you, they will usually ask you to check it at the “Garden safe room” but in case you have it with you in the museum & are not using it, no will reprimand you. There’s separate checkpoints that have x-ray machines. There is outside the courtyard, then there is before the steps of the museum & a third right inside the doors.

Related Posts:

• The Pharaoh’s Role in Ancient Egypt
• Ancient Egypt Clothing
• Ancient Egypt Religion and gods