Egypt

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.

- The Gold Mask Of Tutankhamun And Its Significance
Art Museum Journal (Stan Parchin) British archaeologist Howard Carter uncovered the Gold Mask of Tutankhamun (ca. 1332-1323 B.C.) in 1925. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Harry Burton recorded the spectacular find in crisp black-and-white photographs,...

- Exhibition: Tutankhamun And The Golden Age Of Pharaohs
Art Museum Journal (Stan Parchin) With some lovely photos. Ancient Egypt's later 18th Dynasty and its controversial personalities come alive in an expanded version of the compelling special exhibition Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs...

- Egypt In Pictures
Times Online To celebrate their new Egypt special the Times Online has added a gallery of 12 photographs from the Rough Guide archives following the publication of the latest edition of their Egypt guide. Click on the link in the MULTIMEDIA box (Gallery:...

- Exhibition: Tutankhamun In London
Thanks very much to Bob Partridge, Editor of Ancient Egypt magazine for the following: A meeting special meeting was held at the Dome in Greenwich on Monday 12th March to the forthcoming “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” exhibition....

- Exhibition: Amarna, Ancient Egypt's Place In The Sun
http://www.museum.upenn.edu/new/exhibits/exhibits_looking.shtml http://www.museum.upenn.edu/new/exhibits/amarna/about2.shtmlThe University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has announced a new exhibition, running from November 12,...

Egypt