The Egyptian Museum

The next day our touring started with a visit to the Egyptian Museum. As I’m not a big museum person, I wasn’t really looking forward to this but it turned out to be one of my favorite things we did. You’re not allowed to bring cameras into the museum, and you have to check them at a stand outside the museum which is just a little house that holds hundreds of cameras! We were worried our cameras would be gone when we came out (I took out my memory card and battery just in case) but luckily we had no problems.

The museum was built in 1904 and is definitely showing its age – the cases that contain the artifacts are dirty and scratched and some are even held together by tape. Some of the descriptions, instead of being printed on plastic, look like they were just printed on computer paper, cut out, and placed inside the box. Some of the bigger artifacts are just sitting out in the open, and even though you’re not supposed to you can touch them!

Most of the loot from King Tut’s tomb is in the museum, and all of it is amazingly well preserved. It’s crazy to think these artifacts are 2000+ years old and here we are looking at all of them. In one of the cases are some alabaster jars that held perfumes and what not, and our guide told us that when they open the case to clean the inside glass you can still smell the perfumes. There was a special room that was better taken care of than the rest of the museum, and it held the jewelry and famous sarcophagus of King Tut. It was amazing to see it in real life when I’ve seen pictures of it for years.

My favorite artifacts in the museum were the person items of the ancient Egyptians, like eyeliner tubes and applicators, mirrors and clothing. Yes, linens have survived the test of time and are displayed in the museum. There were even a few pairs of sandals that looked somewhat like the gladiator sandals that are popular today.

The final thing we saw in the museum was the Royal Mummies Hall, for which you had to again pay extra (they make everyone pay extra for the good stuff in Egypt!) There were three rooms – two of people mummies and one of animal mummies. The people mummies were creepy but really cool – the hands, feet, and heads of the mummies were unwrapped and still recognizable as human. They still had nails, some had hair, and one even still had its eyelashes! The animal mummy hall was interesting because I had no idea the Egyptians mummified animals. There were mummified crocodiles reaching about 20 feet in length, lots of baboons (a favorite pet of the royals), birds, dogs, and cats.