Egypt Guide
Cairo
The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities
Opening time: Daily 9am-6.45pm; Ramadan 9am-4pm
Price: £E50, students £E25
Website: www.egyptianmuseum.gov.eg
Downtown's biggest attraction is the Egyptian Museum, or to give it its full title, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, at the northern end of Midan Tahrir. Founded in 1858 by Auguste Mariette, who excavated the Serapeum at Saqqara and several major temples in Upper Egypt (and who was later buried in the museum grounds), it has long since outgrown its present building, which now scarcely provides warehouse space for the pharaonic artefacts. Allowing one minute for each, it would take about nine months to view its 136,000 exhibits. Forty thousand more items lie crated in the basement, where many have sunk into the soft ground, necessitating excavations beneath the building itself. A new Grand Egyptian Museum, which will house some or all the exhibits in the present one, is already under construction by the Pyramids of Giza, and is due to open in around 2015. Meanwhile, for all the chaos, poor lighting and captioning of the old museum, the richness of the collection makes this one of the world's few truly great museums.
A single visit of three to four hours suffices to cover the Tutankhamun exhibition and a few other highlights. Everyone has their favourites, but a reasonable shortlist might include, on the ground floor, the Amarna galleries (rooms 3 and 8), the cream of statuary from the Old, Middle and New kingdoms (rooms 42,32,22 and 12) and the Nubian funerary cache (Room 44); on the upper floor, the Fayoum Portraits (Room 14) and model figures (rooms 37, 32 and 27), and, of course, the Mummy Room (Room 56) – though it costs extra.
Outside the museum, by the camera deposit, you'll probably be offered a guided tour, which generally lasts two hours (at £E50–80 per hour, depending on your bargaining skills), though the museum deserves at least six. The guides are extremely knowledgeable and they do help you to make sense of it all. Alternatively, you can rent headphones with a recorded commentary in English, Arabic or French (£E20; you'll need your passport as a deposit), and numbers to press on a handset for each of the items covered.