Egyptian Museum to open new mummy showroom

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The Cairo-based Egyptian Museum of Antiquities will open soon a second showroom for displaying more mummies to attract more visitors from the world, the Egyptian Gazette daily reported Tuesday. Preparations for inaugurating a second showroom for mummies with a cost of 1.5 million Egyptian Pounds (259,067 US dollars) by the end of this year, Wafaa el-Seddiq, director general of the museum was quoted as saying. The new showroom No. 52, which will display 12 newly discovered mummies, has been provided with the latest-state-of-the-art techniques to ensure the best display quality for the visitors, she added. At present, 11 mummies from Luxor in southern Egypt were being displayed at showroom No. 56, which was opened in 1994, Seddiq said, adding that the new mummies were among 27 mummies that had been unearthed in Luxor recently. The new showroom, which occupies an area of 170 square meters, has been designed like a tomb in order to make visitors feel like entering a real cemetery that dates back to the modern pharaonic state. The Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, which was built more than 100 years ago and has been one of the most attracting sites in Egypt, houses the richest store of remains from the 3,000 years long age of ancient Egyptian civilization.