We get up early for our trip to the Cairo Museum.  It is Sunday and bound to be packed with people.  Breakfast includes crepes and fruits and tea.  It is a nice day, hot but dry - no humidity. Our jet lag is not bad.  I can breathe, despite the pollution (not bad today).  It is a mob at the museum.  And there is no air conditioning (except in a few rooms).  The museum is old, old, old, like the old dinosaur wing at the Museum of Natural History in New York.  Glass cases, darkly lit, no labels.  It seems dusty and it is very hot and crowded.  Little women come along, maids with dusters, dusting.  There are many tour guides with groups.  The Museum is so run down, but the splendors with in are breathtaking.  It is a crime that such magnificence doesn't have a museum display to match it.  They say only 10% of the museum is actually on display - the rest is in the basement! To be the architect to redesign and build a great new museum for Cairo.

My dream, to roam the Cairo Museum basement or even the museum at night...a la Anne Rice, of course. What treasures!  The jewelry! The mummies!  That was amazing to look at the mummies of Ramses II and Seti I.  He looked like he was just sleeping, and 3000 years old!

We see the famous Narmer Palette....stone tables for mummification , statues of Pharoahs, sarcophagi, ancient coffins and the most magnificent Queens' jewelry collection, the silver sarcophagi of the Nubian Kings, and the treasures of the Tomb of Tutankhamun.

Most of the second floor is dedicated to Tutankhamun.  There was more than I thought, it was all much bigger, and there was more gold than I had imagined or could conceive of from the books I had read.  I was not prepared for the size of the beds.  Nor the size of the chariots, the hundred of golden amulets and the golden coffins. The four shrines were stupendous, large, golden, unbelieveable.  Later when we saw his tomb we couldn't imagine they fit inside!  The golden mask was so striking.  Click here to go to the photos of the treasures of the Museum and of Tutankhamun. The funerary shrines were enormous and theire were four of them, all nested together in the tomb, now laid out so you could go all around them.  The mask of Tutankhamun was breathtaking, the two coffins incredibly delicate (the third is in his tomb with his mummy in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor).  And an entire room of his jewelry and all the amulets buried with him.  Imagine the most incredible treasure and that's Tutankhamun's, so imagine what the great Pharoahs tombs must have contained!  The circlet crown with Horus and the cobra was so delicate.
 

The second most fascinating room was Tutankhamun's presumed father, Akhenaton (born Amenhotep III) - the heretic king who proclaimed one god - monotheism - before Christ. His palace was built for him in a new city between Luxor and Cairo deep in the desert.  It was filled with drawings of nature and the family of the king, drawn with a strange new style. The statues were so stunningly different. And Nefertiti his Queen was the most beautiful woman.  I loved the scenes of geese and birds and plants...lotus and papyrus.

His Queen Nefertiti is synonymous with beauty today and you only have to look at her two sculptures to see why.

Tel el Armara was such a find for Egyptologists.  Recently, I read the Amelia Peabody mystery set during that time.  Good book!

There were beautiful paintings of birds and plants, lotus and papyrus.  Statues of all the great Pharoahs, standing larger than life filled the rest of the museum.  Tutmoses III and Amenhotep his scribe. They are divided into New Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and Old Kingdom. The tiny statue of Cheops/Khufu was inspiring.  The builder of the great pyramid and all we have is this tiny tiny statue of him.

To Day 3 continued

To Photos