I knew before I came to Egypt, that the big, new, state of the art Egyptian Museum was not yet open. I didn’t know until I got here that another new museum had opened in 2021 – the Egyptian Museum of Civilisation.
I visited it with a less than brilliant guide – he just kept reading the signs to me. But that was okay, because I took my time and didn’t really need a guide anyway. I booked this tour at the last minute for my last full day in Cairo. Even though the tour price is higher for a solo traveler, the guides don’t like doing single person trips because they get less in tips and have to talk more.
I hate group tours and this is why –
You spend half your tour time waiting for the last member of your group to arrive and the other half looking at the back of your fellow tourists’ heads as you all jockey for position to get your photo. You have no time to stand and stare at the things that engage your interest, or anything in fact the guide has not decided to stop at. And often you can’t hear the guide either.
At the late date I booked, I was lucky to get a guide at all, let alone one who spoke English. Besides, as you’ll see if you read An Unexpected Egyptian Adventure: The Post Office, he had the patience of a saint with me, and his translation services were a great help there.
Twenty of the royal mummies are in the Egyptian Museum of Civilisation. They were brought there in April 2021 from the old museum on Tahrir Square. It must have been an extraordinary parade. Each mummy had its own tricked out tank.
They progressed in chronological order, and security was very tight, as you might imagine.
This was not their first move.
These mummies were part of a cache of fifty royal mummies and their funerary equipment found near the temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri.
It’s a ripping yarn of the wild days of early Egyptology. From 1874, antiquities started showing up on the black market which didn’t seem to come from any tombs which were known. The logical conclusion was that thieves had found an unknown tomb and were systematically robbing it. It wasn’t until 1881 that local authorities were able to trace these suspect antiquities back to the family of Abd el Rassul. The Rassul family was notorious as the discoverers of more and better antiquities and tombs than European egyptologists. They had practiced grave robbing, probably since the time of the pharaohs.
Their attitude, which I personally agree with, was that these were the treasures of their ancestors, not the Europeans and they had just as good, if not a better right to them.
This being 1881, and therefore Egypt being essentially ruled by colonizing foreigners, the authorities did not agree and the Rassuls were arrested and tortured until they gave up the location of the cache.
The story Abd el-Rassul told was that one of his goats fell down a shaft and when he lowered himself down to retrieve the goat, he found the tomb (which belonged to a priest) and the cache.
It was thought that the priesthood during one of the Intermediate Periods (when chaos reigned in Egypt and tomb robbing was rampant), had gathered up as many mummies and grave goods of pharaohs and their families as they could and deposited them in this tomb for safekeeping.
When the royal mummies were loaded on barges and taken up river to Cairo, the people of Egypt lined the banks, wailing in mourning and pouring dust on their heads in a show of respect – and possibly grief for the lost glory of ancient Egypt.
Egyptians have great pride in their past. President Sadat actually closed the former mummy room in the old Egyptian Museum. He thought it was disrespectful to display the cadavers. In fact, he wanted them re-interred in their tombs.
There was and still is, much debate about the provenance of the grave goods and even the identification of the mummies. In the late 18th century, the European Powers rotated the extremely important and lucrative position of Head of the Antiquities Service amongst themselves. This enabled whichever country was in charge, to get the best pieces dug up that season for the museums in their own country. No Egyptians need apply of course.
Gaston Maspero was the (French) Head of the Antiquities Service at this time. He was absent when Abd el-Rassul gave up the location of the tomb. Emil Brusch, a German, took over in his absence. He caused the entire contents of the tomb to be cleared out in 48 hours, without making a survey, a plan of the location of the objects relative to each other or any other investigations. When he went back to record the information, gee whiz, he’d forgotten a lot of it. And in fairness, the cache was not exactly labeled or left in any order.
You enter the area in which the ancient kings and queens are displayed by means of a descending ramp. It put me in mind of the passages which lead through the tombs and pyramids. Luckily, you don’t have to bend over.
They have done everything they can to ensure the dignity of the dead monarchs. There are no photos allowed. You are also not supposed to talk. This is a graveyard after all. Of course, that prohibition was not observed by the group tour that fell in behind me. The guard had to keep yelling “Quiet! Quiet!”
Each pharaoh or queen has his or her own area, with signage in arabic and english, describing their life and accomplishments
You can find some photos of the royal mummies on postcards.
The mummy of Poor Ahmose (top left corner) didn’t survive too well. This is not surprising given it was moved several times.
Thutmosis I (bottom right corner) and Thutmosis III were warriors kings.
Rameses II (bottom left corner) was in the mix of course. He reigned for 66 years and had an ego as big as Egypt, so he is everywhere.
The handsome fellow in the top middle row is Seti I who died at around 40 years old. I hope to get into his tomb in The Valley of the Kings in Luxor. It is one of the largest and most beautifully decorated.
He restored the empire of Egypt after the chaos that followed the ‘heretic pharaoh’ Akhenaton who moved the capital from ancient Thebes (now Luxor) to Amarna. He instituted the first monotheistic religion. He decreed there was only one god, personified by the Aton – the sun disk. His wife was the beautiful Nefertiti, immortalized in the famous bust now in the Berlin Museum, where I saw it.
Akhenaton was the father of King Tutankhamun.
The only thing from King Tut that I saw here, was in the textile gallery – King Tut’s loincloth. For real.
Tutankhamun was just a boy when his father, the heretic pharaoh, died. Egypt as a whole, and the priesthood in particular, were not happy about the monotheism craze. Seti I sorted it all out and the old gods returned to Egypt.
The ‘Amarna’ period of Akhenaton is the only one whose art I can identify at sight.
It was rather bizarre and a huge departure from how pharaoh and his family were usually depicted before and after Akhenaton.
Enough about the mummies, except one last observation. Okay, a complaint really.
Hatshepsut was the only female pharaoh with any power, at least in Egypt’s glory days.
Yes, yes, I hear you saying, “But what about Cleopatra?” First, she was a Greek not an Egyptian, secondly, she nominally ruled over an Egypt colonized by the Greeks and then the Romans and thirdly, her power, such as it as, was what she could grasp from her brother, and her lovers Julius Caesar and Marc Antony.
Hatshepsut’s mother was Ahmose, the Great Royal Wife of Thutmosis II. He also had a son by a lesser wife (or concubine really). That son was just a boy when Thutmosis II died. Hatshepsut took power.
When Hatshepsut died, she was succeeded by that boy, who became Thutmosis III. He did all in his power to wipe out the memory and immortality of Hatshepsut by destroying her cartouche (the oval with her name in it, which was part of how a pharaoh achieved immortality) on her monuments and temples, or putting his own name over top.
We do have her mummy though, and I saw it in the museum.
This photo is courtesy of the web because, as I said, no photos allowed of the mummies in the museum.
And – no postcards for Hatshepsut!! The erasing of the only powerful female pharaoh continues. What an outrage.
The theory prevailed for many years (and I was told this as fact by my less than stellar guide in the other Egyptian Museum), that Hatshepsut was killed by her half-brother Thutmosis III. There was no evidence of this at all, as her mummy was lost until Dr. Hawi Zawass identified it in 2007. He determined that she was the second mummy found in 1901, in the tomb of Hatshepsut’s nurse (the nurse being the other mummy). If he is right, then it has been proven that she died of cancer.
The Museum was not huge, but it was nicely arranged in chronological order, starting with prehistory and the Old Kingdom and going up to Islamic times.
Sometimes it felt like a scene from Indiana Jones.
One thing I have never seen before or read about was a green and red box.
It actually opened to disclose furniture. Ingenious really.
As far as I could understand my guide’s broken English, notsithstanding the sarcophagus inside for display purposes, such boxes were used as extra rooms. I suppose if the mother-in-law came to visit, you could stick her in the box.
I was very interested to see a chariot, or at least the personnel carrying part of a chariot. I was richly decorated outside.
It was fully decorated inside as well. Imagine the sandalled feet of the king wearing away the decoration at the bottom.
The eye of Horus, aka Wadjet Eye, is still seen everywhere here.
A guide told me that after the god Set killed his brother Osiris, and scattered the pieces across Egypt, Isis, the faithful wife of Osiris went in search of them. She found them all except his penis, which Set had thrown into the Nile. It was eaten by fish. Isis put Osiris back together and gave him a wooden penis. It must have worked fine because they had a son, Horus.
Horus wanted vengeance on Set, but in the ensuing fight, Set took his eye. Isis, being magical, put it back. But the lost eye became the wadjet symbol.
I have never read this story anywhere else. Other legends say the eyes of Horus are the sun and moon.
This lovely scribe statue is quite famous and is on some of the money.
There were Jewish items (although not many).
The Torah scroll boxes are much smaller than the box for the Koran.
The Islamic section also had some lovely carved doors.
There were two more kiswas (the cloth that covers the Ka’aba in Mecca, which I referred to in Alexandria – The End of Pharaonic Times, as well as the tented domes that the kiswa is put into, for transport by camel back to the Ka’aba
Copitc (christian civilisation) was represented by, among other things, a lovely painted dome.
There was also a section devoted to textiles, from the ancient to more modern.
That’s where Tut’s loincloth was displayed, along with shirts and dresses that could easily have come from medieval times in Europe.
Imagine linen or flax surviving for thousands of years. This is quite rare. There were also dresses from more modern times. (Click on the photo for a clearer view.)
Mohamed Ali was the Turkish viceroy of Egypt in the early to mid-19th century. I can’t help thinking the prayer carpet above, would have been very hard on the knees.
Okay, as your reward for reading this far, enjoy these photos from the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization without further commentary. Click on the arrows to see the slideshow.
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