The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities

A couple of days ago, Nate and I ventured to the Egyptian Museum. It's only a few metro stops from us, and a big tourist attraction, so it seemed like an easy early venture.

We left early in the morning with the hopes of finding a place to sit, have some breakfast, and read Al-Ahram, the weekly English version of the Egyptian Daily. Plus, we had woken up at 3:30 am that particular morning and hadn't been able to fall asleep again, so we thought we might as well seize the early parts of the day (something neither of us are generally too good at doing). We got out of the metro and began walking around, looking for a cafe. Since we were very close to the American University in Cairo, we thought there must be some places with a more western style breakfast around ... mmm not so much. There was a KFC, a McDonald's, a Hardee's (haven't seen one of those in a long time!), and a Pizza Hut ... but not a single bakery or Egyptian restaurant around. Not even many cafes were open, except for the ones that cater to the early morning sheesha (the Egyptian version of the water pipe, often filled with fruit flavored tobacco; also known as a hookah) crowd. We did pass by some more traditional Egyptian food stands on the street. One served fu'ul, a dish made from mashed chickpeas with onions and pickled vegetables on top, very tasty for a lunch or dinner treat, but a bit much for our over-sensitive morning stomachs. The other was serving ta'amyia, more commonly known by Americans as falafel, a fried ball made with chickpeas and served in pita.

Suffice it to say, Nate and I settled for an overly expensive croissant ($1.25) at the Hilton bakery. Sad, we know, but so it goes.

We finally made it to the museum around noon.

The Egyptian Museum has some incredible stuff -- things that all 6th grade history textbooks have pictures of. The best known pieces of their collection were probably all from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, like his death mask on the right. They had statues and paintings from 3500 BC, mummies of animals from almost that long ago, and incredible Greco-Egyptian statues. Walking by these things, however, one would be hard pressed to tell if they were important or not. Many things were not enclosed in cases, the display cases that were there were dusty and had water stains, the majority of the items were simply numbered (not explained or captioned), and the museum was certainly not climate controlled. Aside from our tour book, which happened to have a section devoted to the museum, there was no way to make sense of the collection there. It's too bad that such incredible treasures are so easy to miss.