Monday, July 06, 2009

Monuments discovered in Egyptian Museum

Egypt State Information Service

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni said Saturday 4/7/2009 that during working in the project of developing the Egyptian Museum, a monument cache was discovered near the western door's stair in the western part of the Egyptian Museum in el-Tahrir.

The Minister said the cache is part of four other parts of a broken inscription that contain limestone hieroglyphic writing. It was divided into two parts with some hieroglyphic signs.

Dr. Zahi Hawass, the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that he believed that these monuments were buried in the past in this place through the Egyptian Museum archeologists when they were transferring the monuments from the archeological sites to the museum for storage.

Hawass pointed out that the Museum archeologists were examining the ancient monuments to bury the artificial pieces but these genuine ones were buried by mistake.

3 comments:

Jane Akshar said...

This does not surprise me at all. I bet all the big museums have treasures hidden away in odd corners. I had a friend who worked at the British Museum and she reckoned an archaeological dig in the basement would reveal tons of stuff

Rhio Barnhart said...

This museum must be quite a place! Never been, but hope to some day.
As I recall, the recent TV special on identifying the Hatshepsut mummy involved a few amusing rounds of "Now where did we put that mummy?" Various perplexed officials with yellowed inventory sheets scratching their heads, opening various coffins etc.
I'm confident that Janice Kamrin's cataloging project will put this right.

Anonymous said...

It would not be half as much fun if this disorganised, cluttered, dusty, uncatalogued, sprawling but incredibly superb museum was organised to the same standard as western museums. Dave hay