Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Travel: Cairo's Egyptian Museum in a day

Times Online (Daniel Jacobs)

The UK's Times Online is offering up some very useful material at the moment as part of their Egypt Travel Special slot, unashamdely drawing on Tutankhamun fever, and offering up some very good contributors. Daniel Jacobs is co-author of the Rough Guide to Egypt, and in this piece he offers advice on how to tackle Cairo's Egyptian Museum at Tahrir Square if all you have at your disposal is a single day.

No modern, well-lit, carefully laid-out exhibition this - it's a museum like they used to make them, with lots of exhibits in long galleries and precious little by way of explanation, but oh boy, what exhibits!

The museum's most famous possessions, of course, are the treasures found by Howard Carter in the tomb of Tutankhamun, the gilded statues, the thrones, the alabaster canopic jars, the exquisite gold jewellery, and the centrepiece, the emblem of the whole collection, that fabulous, jaw-dropping, solid gold, inlaid funeral mask, all eleven kilos of it. Tut's treasures alone need a good hour or two to take in, but even without them, this would still be, for all its higgledy-piggledy dusty old layout, one of the world's top museums, and a must-see by any standards.

Really you need a couple of visits at least to take it all in, but if you only have a day and you want to see the very top highlights, the first thing to do when you enter the museum is to go straight ahead, right through the atrium, until you get to the other end, where the Amarna gallery (room #3) is dedicated to the reign of one very special pharaoh, Tutankamun's father, the heretic king Akhenaten.

Jacobs goes on to whisk us through the Amarna gallery before proceeding to other galleries to pick out the must-see items.

The Egypt Travel Special home page on the Times Online is well worth a look.

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