Museum of Egyptian Antiquities Photo Collection

Description: The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities (or Egyptian Museum) was originally established by the Egyptian government in 1835 in Cairo, Egypt. The collections of this earlier museum were then given to Archduke Maximillian of Austria in 1855. Following this action a new Egyptian Museum was established in 1858 following the creation of the Antiquities Department. The collections at this time were housed in a building on the Nile, but in 1878 suffered serious damage from flooding. The collections were then moved in 1891 and arrived in their current location in 1901/2 following the construction of a large Neoclassical building in Tahrir Square.

The museum houses over 120,000 items and is continuously added to with ongoing excavations throughout Egypt. The ground floor of the museum has rooms arranged around a large hall and houses large-scale stone statues and architectural elements. The various rooms progress chronologically through Egyptian history beginning in the pre-dynastic period and ending in the Greco-Roman period. The most notable and largest of the artifacts housed on the ground floor come from the New Kingdom and include statues, sarcophagi, and tables.

The first floor houses smaller objects and works. Prominent among these collections are an enormous array of wooden sarcophagi and fragmentary pieces of papyrus. Two special rooms on the first floor house various royal mummies (the majority of which come from the New Kingdom). However, twenty-two of these mummies were transferred to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat in 2021.

Outside of the museum, in the gardens, there is a large memorial dedicated to famous egyptologist including Jean-François Champollion, Salim Hassan, and other early, prominent scholars. (Museum of Egyptian Antiquities)

(Wikimedia Commons/Egyptian Museum)