By Nevine El-Aref: "North Sinai's National Day celebration had a different flavour this year. Apart from the inauguration of new urban development projects that usually mark the event, the city's long-awaited LE50 million National Museum is at last finished.
The two-storey Al-Arish National Museum (ANM) will make a huge visual difference to North Sinai's capital city. The temple- shaped, honey-coloured edifice has finally been revealed after being hidden for almost a decade under ugly iron scaffolding, wooden panels and plastic sheets.
Although plans for the museum were drawn up in 1994 -- shortly after the return of Sinai's archaeological collection taken by Israel during their occupation -- the foundation stone was laid only in 1998. . . . The 2,500-square-metre museum tells the history of Sinai from the pre-dynastic to the Islamic eras, displaying 1,500 objects carefully selected from eight museums in Egypt: the Egyptian, Coptic and Islamic museums in Cairo, the Recovered Antiquities Museum at the Citadel, the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, the Sinai Historical Museum in Taba, the Port Said Museum, and the Beni Sweif museological storehouses in Ashmounein. Artefacts unearthed at excavation sites in Sinai such as the Horus military road in Qantara East and Tel Basta in the Nile Delta are also on display."
The two-storey Al-Arish National Museum (ANM) will make a huge visual difference to North Sinai's capital city. The temple- shaped, honey-coloured edifice has finally been revealed after being hidden for almost a decade under ugly iron scaffolding, wooden panels and plastic sheets.
Although plans for the museum were drawn up in 1994 -- shortly after the return of Sinai's archaeological collection taken by Israel during their occupation -- the foundation stone was laid only in 1998. . . . The 2,500-square-metre museum tells the history of Sinai from the pre-dynastic to the Islamic eras, displaying 1,500 objects carefully selected from eight museums in Egypt: the Egyptian, Coptic and Islamic museums in Cairo, the Recovered Antiquities Museum at the Citadel, the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, the Sinai Historical Museum in Taba, the Port Said Museum, and the Beni Sweif museological storehouses in Ashmounein. Artefacts unearthed at excavation sites in Sinai such as the Horus military road in Qantara East and Tel Basta in the Nile Delta are also on display."
See the above page for full details of the museum, together with potted histories of Al-Arish and the Horus Road.
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