Description of the attraction
The Egyptian Museum in Cairo is one of the main repositories of the historical heritage of Egypt and is very popular among tourists due to its scale and impressive number of exhibits, which exceeds one hundred and twenty thousand units. The museum building was built in 1900, and the collection of the museum began to collect in the 30s of the 19th century. A special government organization was created, which took over the functions of collecting and preserving unique exhibits. The museum consists of one hundred separate rooms that contain finds from the era of the pharaohs, found during excavations throughout the country. The chronological order is traced in the expositions.
The first floor is filled with statues, various vessels, gravestones and other monuments of ancient history. The second floor is dedicated to all finds, sculptures and jewelry that are related to the tomb of Tutankhamun and other tombs. There is a hall with a special microclimate here, where mummies discovered by archaeologists at different times are kept.
The museum is unique in the presence of the world-famous gilded throne of Tutankhamun, on which there are precious stones and images of the pharaoh and his wife. The oldest sculptural units are located here, which date back three millennia of their existence. Three sarcophagi made of pure gold, weighing approximately one hundred kilograms each, are incredible in value. Thanks to other exhibits, such as the bird from Saqqara, one can imagine what deep knowledge about life the ancient Egyptians possessed.
Two people are considered the founders and ideological inspirers of the museum. The first of them is the ruler of Egypt, Mohammed Ali, who, by his decree, forbade the export of antiquities outside the country. The second is the Frenchman Auguste Mariette, who became the first director of the Cairo Museum and the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Initially, the museum occupied four rooms in the house where Mariette settled, on the banks of the Nile. And only in 1902 it was decided to build a building for a museum in the center of Cairo.
