Today was our big
Cairo Museum day.

It was built during the reign of Khedive Abbass Helmi II in 1897, and opened on November 15, 1902.

With 107 halls it is the home to the most extensive collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities in the world.

It has over 120,000 items, with a representative amount on display, the remainder in storerooms.

At the ground floor there are the huge statues. The upper floor houses small statues, jewels, Tutankhamen treasures and the mummies.

More than a million and half tourists visit the museum annually, in addition to half a million Egyptians.

Many priceless objects are crammed into corners, poorly lit/labeled and suffer from heat and humidity from the weather and the thousands of tourist pouring through the facility every day.

The Egyptian Antiquities Service has come under harsh criticism over the last few decades due to these poor conditions and this has undermined their understandable push to have the artifacts looted over the last three centuries returned to Egypt.

Great strides are being made to shift this situation with the construction of many modern and excellent regional museums as well as the construction of a crown jewel with the Grand Egyptian Museum, scheduled to open in 2011 (or 2012, or 2013... depending on how much of the globally traditional graft, bribes and corruption actually get the job done...)

We saw the famous Narmer Palette (below), a stone marking the violent unification of Upper and Lower Egypt lauching the Old Kingdom.

Much noise has been made about the enlongated face of Akhenaten.

I spent some time staring at this statue, imagining it to be 30 to 40 feet taller to see if the foreshortening argument held.

The foreshortening argument is a load of crap...

He still looks all stretched out...

Here I am with a statue of
Ramses II portraying himself as Nefertum, son of Ptah and Sekhmet.

Because (almost) everyone
wants to be Nefertum!

Embodiment of the mystical third...

nefertum.com