The Egyptian Museum

"Come. Sit." Said the guard, patting the bench next to him. I complied, parking myself on the small bench against one of the thick, cool walls of the Egyptian Musuem in Cairo, my first stop on today's sightseeing. "You take photo?" the guard asked, gesturing at my camera.

"Oh no," I replied, knowing that it was not allowed. I had taken photos, but only when no one was looking.

"You want?" he asked. He was a small man, in his 40's. I'm sure he had a wife and kids, maybe two wives and kids, and probably didn't make that much in the museum. I saw what was coming and shook my head no. "You take photo Ramses," he insisted, gesturing at what was clearly labelled in English as a statue of King Amenhotep IV. The guard got up, walked 50 feet away to stand in among some haphazardly placed lesser statues, tried to look busy for a moment, then turned to shoot me a furtive nod and wink. I dutifully stood up, took my photo, then slipped him 5 Egyptian Pounds ($1) in one of those pleasing sly bribe-passing handshakes.

There may be museums more poorly curated then the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but none would has a more significant collection. The pieces, when considered for there craftmanship, age, and symbolism are simply stunning. Some are up to 5000 years old, and are all the more moving for having remained very aesthetically pleasing right up until today. The jewellery would not at all look out of place on one my friends or sisters. But they are just sort of cast about the cavernous building, like so much furniture on discount in a warehouse sale. My sister, who has been here before, told me to get a guide or I would be lost. So naturally I declined to get a guide.

In a way, the lack of order is almost fitting. To me, the magic of the these artefacts is much more in the stories of their discovery than in the ancient, alien lives of the people who found them – and when they were found, they were locked up in some cramped tomb, piled one on top of the other, certainly in no order and with no captions.

This only dawned on me when I saw some of the photos of the explorers who uncovered them, and the condition in which they found the tombs. King Tutankhamun, a king so minor in the annals of the Pharaohs that his grave was promptly forgotten by his contemporaries and left until Howard Carter stumbled upon it in 1922, beneath some wreckage passed over by generations of prior tomb raiders. They excavated a staircase going down into the earth, into what could have been anything at all. They it was in all likelihood a storage cellar of some sort, but imagine their delight to have found it was one of the richest archaeological finds ever made. I’ve had some lucky breaks in my time, but never anything quite so.

The King Tut exhibit in the museum is, to this layman’s eyes, the only thing really worth going to see. But the sheer amount of gold and glitz, together with those great black and white photos, to make it worth the trip.