The Egyptian Museum is a clunker warehouse of a building, stocked full of the kinds of artifacts that glitter and carry a $20 of $50 admission ticket in American and European museums. Some of the works do glitter in Cairo - the jewelry of Queen H and of course the fabled sarcophogi of Tutankhamen, in their air-conditioned, guarded rooms, are what a tourist might expect. Crowds of Germans, Brits, Indians, Americans - ‘look at the detailing? it takes a long time just to build a coffin these days’ - move in slow, frustrated bursts, looking at necklaces, King Tuts outer jeweled sarcophogus, then the innermost one - ‘did it really fit in the other one?’ A British woman noticed that she was taller than the boy king, and ‘probably couldn’t fit’ in the sarcophogus with the famous headdress that’s striped gold and blue.
And while the room of the mummies is also air-conditioned, presenting thousands-years old monarchs in typical enough museum setting - quiet, sneaking cell phone photos, temperature controlled glass cases for the bodies of Ramses II, Seti, and others, including one whose long curly black hair does not hide an enormous head wound (he was a warrior) - the rest of the museum is, well, a warehouse. Seated statues of all sizes are placed in any corner, along with endless rows of sarcophogi, burial chariots, and in one room, the Greco-Roman mummies from the 2nd century AD, the ones with faded, fresco-style face portraits. The faces look remarkably like modern day Egyptians, a friend said, as we also assumed that one dark bearded portrait must have resembled Jesus. The jewelry room of a Queen H is replicated in any fancy jewelry store here in Cairo.
However much clutter there is in this clunker warehouse of a museum - soon to be moved to new digs out in Giza (like Ramses statue a few weeks ago) - it feels singularly Egyptian, whether in the contemporary faces of the Roman portraits, or by the fact that any American museum would case one of these pieces behind top-of-the-line glass, with a useless, interactive video accompaniment. The copy for the mass of arranged artifacts in the Egyptian Museum, if there is a tag at all, seems purposely vague, sometimes no more than a note in pencil, listing the Pharaonic Dynasty of this headdress, but not the year. But in Egypt, perhaps you’re expected to know that.
