Egyptian Museum and Sakkara

Our group was scheduled to have a private visit to the Egyptian Museum tonight but because a major demonstration was planned for this afternoon the visit was switched to this morning. The Museum is in

Tahrir Square

and we arrived early enough not to see anything out of the ordinary. The very visible mark of the revolution is the shell of the burnt out headquarters of Mubarak’s Democratic Party. It is a very large building next door to the museum and it has been completely destroyed. We left the Museum through a door on the Nile side rather than on

Tahrir Square

. Traffic was pretty bad and lots of flags everywhere but no sign of the demonstration.

The Museum was fantastic. Seeing all the Tutankhamen findings in one place is not an ordinary museum experience. I had seen the Tut exhibit in the 70s and the more recent travelling show, but seeing all the coffins (including the solid gold one) and all the cabinets and the gold mask is incomparable. The mummy room in the musuem has twenty plus mummies of Pharaohs outside their cases. Apparently around 700 BCE, an Egyptian priest fearing that the mummies would be destroyed by tomb robbers moved these mummies into a cave where they remained until found in modern times and moved to the museum.The faces are darkened and shrunken but recognizable. The other highlight for me was the Old Kingdom art. The Met’s OK collection is based around  Perneb’s tomb and some small statues. Boston’s MFA has a better collection but the Egyptian Museum has the Narmer Palette (which is on the first page of every Egyptian History book), incredible stone sculpture and beautiful wall paintings.

After the museum we drove to Sakkara. We visited Djoser’s Step Pyramid (around 2600 BCE) which predates the Great Pyramids on the Giza Plateau. It is under restoration and our group (exclusively) was able to enter the Pyramid and view the interior including looking down into the burial pit. We also visited a beautiful Old Kingdom tomb (the “Tomb of the Brothers”) and a New Kingdom tomb which, when found, brought to light the presence of New Kingdom burial in the Sakkara area.

One more great thrill at the end of the day. From a plateau near the Step Pyramid, I could see twenty pyramids in all directions. If the trip ended tomorrow, it will have been well worth the effort. Tomorrow, however, off to Memphis and the outdoor museum and then a flight to Aswan.