After touring Islamic Cairo, our next stop was the Egyptian Museum. We only saw one or two small groups of tourists in Islamic Cairo– and no other Americans– but we soon realized why: all of the tour groups were at the museum!
While we were planning our trip, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that the new “Grand Egyptian Museum” would likely open next year (ETA: The opening has subsequently been postponed to 2020)– the current museum has so many artifacts that there just isn’t space for them all to be displayed. A significant portion of the museum floor is dedicated just to King Tut’s treasure– but there are many other treasures to see, and it helps to have someone help you wade through room after room of spectacularly preserved objects.
Despite being a bit sad to not be able to visit the Grand Egyptian Museum, I am very happy to have been able to visit the current incarnation, which is truly a gem. It is an archetypal 1930s museum, the kind you’d expect to see in a period film where archaeologists are toiling in a hot and dusty back room examining their finds. Most of the objects were stored in wooden barrister type cabinets, and secured with Yale locks that looked like they were at least 60-70 years old. Many of the objects lacked any kind of English signage; for those that did have it, they were often simple 3 x 5 note cards with a type-written (as in, on a type writer, not a Word Processor with Courier New ) explanation.
Our first stop was to visit various sarcophagi and related accoutrements. The large stone slab below was used in the rather gruesome task of making mummies. It was carved to have a slight incline so the person’s feet would be higher than his head, and you can see there is a small hole in the upper-middle of the photograph, which would allow the blood to drain into the basin. The Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife (as will become glaringly evident in many subsequent posts), and mummification was a way to keep the body in good fighting shape for all eternity. We paid extra to go into the “Royal Mummy Room,” which was a pretty surreal experience— imagine a couple dozen mummies laying in perfect silence, as a couple tourists shuffled by. Ramses II’s mummy had thin yellow hair. A female mummy had a head full of braids. And on many, you could still see their fingernails, perfectly preserved after 3,000+ years. While they weren’t entirely life-like, they also weren’t skeletal: their faces looked like they had just gone to sleep, peacefully, with their arms crossed over their chests. The one thing was glaringly not life-like was the fact that their necks were skinnier than my arm.
Anyway, on to happier topics! Below is a statue of King Men-kau-re (center), Hathor (left), and a goddess, made out of “greywacke” (if you are wondering what that is, I had never heard of it until this trip– apparently it is a type of gray sandstone). This statue is 4,500 years old. Wrap your head around that for a second. This was the bronze age, and people would have carved this with handmade metal tools. When you see things like this, it’s easy to see why there are conspiracy theorists who believe the pyramids were made by aliens…because the fact that people made this over four millennia ago is almost impossible to comprehend.
Of course, the inexorable march of progress is never guaranteed. Here is our awesome guide Mamdouah explaining this statue. If you look closely at the statue’s legs, you will see that they look very fat, have massive cankles, and the feet are oversized. It’s not intended to be that way, but during the so-called Intermediate Period of Egyptian history, the leaders and society at large were too busy with civil wars and internal dysfunction to fuss much with the training and skill necessary to produce fine art or monumental works. So the pyramids and sculpture above from the earlier kingdom are actually much grander, larger, or finer than some of the stuff from the middle of Egyptian history. Regression, it happens to the best of us…
I was really impressed at the diversity of the art. Seeing all of the colors and paints was also quite striking, especially when you consider that most (if not all) the Greek marbles, which are 1,500+ years younger, have completely lost their color. This is a noble couple; men were always painted a darker brown color (because they were out in the sun working) while women were painted a paler white. Except King (Queen) Hatshepsut, who apparently inculcated the male-centric minds of everyday Egyptians by having artists depict her as brown, with a beard, and using the male pronouns…but more on her in a later post. The eyes in these statues were made of quartz and other semi-precious stones. It’s hard to capture the impact on film, but in person they have a penetrating, unwavering stare. The effect is so creepy that I definitely wouldn’t want to be alone with these guys in the dark because they also certainly come back to life when the museum is closed for the night!
Here is a statue of a scribe, and according to people who know stuff about things it was actually quite a feat for the ancients to have his arms be free standing like this. Normally, there would not have been air between them in this manner, because it jeopardizes the strength and durability of the statue, and as it turns all of the scribe statues we saw in Luxor had the space between the arms and the body filled in.
This statue is the beginning of my mild obsession with Horus, the falcon god. For some reason I just find Horus to be a really endearing character whenever he makes an appearance on the scene. In Egyptian mythology he actually kind of a badass killer, so endearing is probably not the look they were going for. It is what it is.
A stela, which looks like a tombstone but in this case is more just a commemorative item of some significant event or person :
We stopped for a break in the middle of a tour for a photo with some pretty epic papyrus scrolls:
Eventually, we came upon King Tut’s treasure. This is the outermost shrine of King Tut’s tomb. There were four of these nested within each other like Matryoska dolls, and then Tut’s sarcophagus stored within it. How they squeezed all of this into a simple rock-cut tomb is beyond me. And the fact that this is the decor and ornamentation they rolled out for an 18 year old nobody makes my heart hurt for what must have been looted or destroyed from the dozens of other royal burials. Lost to history, known only to the ancients…
Here is a set of alabaster canopic jars from King Tut’s tomb. This is where they put the guts after mummifying the pharaohs. These ones were particularly large, this set came up about waist-high.
Inside King Tut’s sarcophagus was his mummy, and of course his famous gold burial mask. This was all in a special room within the museum where no photographs were allowed, and the rules strictly enforced. Perhaps even more impressive than the gold mask and sarcophagus was all of the jewelry the mummy was draped with. Much of the jewelry was made with semi-precious stones, including lapis lazuli, which I will note is not native to Egypt. Which means the Egyptians had a global supply chain even 3,000 years ago!
Tut’s golden sandals:
The arm rest of a gilded chair from the tomb:
A common motif in the ancient sites we visited later showed the king’s enemies under his feet. Here that motif has manifest itself on Tut’s footstool, which is carved with the enemies of Egypt:
An ancient parasol, with a mechanism that would allow it to expand out like an umbrella:
Anubis:
A fan made out of ostrich feathers:
Beautiful alabaster:
The Ancient Egyptians were prolific writers, which left behind so much for us to learn about their religion and their daily life. Severin gave me a 550 page book about Ancient Egypt and when I finished it a few months after our trip, he gave me an astonished, “I didn’t think you were going to read it all!” But it was fascinating history and impressive how much detail we know about people who lived so long ago.
Our last stop was the Animal Mummy Room, which had mummified birds, dogs, cats, and baboons.
The coolest mummified animal was this crocodile– look at how massive it is!
And here is a mummified Nile perch:
