Egypt Guide
The Nile Valley
Mummification Museum
Opening time: Daily: summer 9am–10pm; winter 9am–9pm
Price: £E40, student £E20
At the northern end of the Nile Shopping Centre below the Corniche, Luxor's Mummification Museum devotes more space to the beliefs surrounding death and the afterlife than to the actual practice of mummification and hardly breaks new ground. It does, however, display a spoon and spatula used to remove the deceased's brain, which was discarded by the Egyptians as an unimportant organ, unlike the viscera, which were preserved in canopic jars. A statue of Anubis, the jackal god of mummification, watches over the collection of reptile and bird mummies and a well-preserved XXI Dynasty official, Maserharti.
In wintertime on Saturdays at 7pm there is a free archeological lecture by such experts as Kent Weeks (studying tomb KV5 in the Valley of the Kings), Houry Souralzin (excavating the mortuary temple of Amenophis III) and Zbigniew Szafranski (of the Polish Mission at Deir el-Bahri). Visitors can consult the museum's Egyptology reference library (daily 9am-6pm; free).