Issue No. 600
Heritage
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22 - 28 August 2002 Issue No. 600 Heritage |
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Housing history
The first step towards the creation of a museum of antiquities was taken in 1835 in the time of Mohamed Ali Pasha, the founder of modern Egypt, when the French scholar Auguste Mariette took the initiative of officially establishing "Le Service des Antiquités de L'Egypte". One of the aims was to put an end to the indiscriminate plunder of Egyptian monuments. Until then, miscellaneous Egyptian antiquities had been stored in a building in Al-Ezbekiya gardens; later, on the orders of Mohamed Ali, the collection was transferred to a building within the Citadel of Salaheddin. However in 1858, with Mariette as director of the Antiquities Service and with the encouragement of Khedive Ismail, the former premises were acquired of the overland transit company on the banks of the Nile in Boulaq, a convenient place for off loading cumbersome antiquities transported on barges down the Nile.
This site was near today's Radio and Television Building. Although Mariette regarded it as a temporary museum while he planned suitably impressive and more centrally- located premises, he went to great efforts to remodel the building. He adorned its façade in neo-Pharaonic style and arranged the antiquities -- which ranged from Pharaonic sphinxes and stelae to statues, false doors, busts and scarabs -- into a chronologically- disorganised collection; but while appealing to the eye of the casual visitor, this did little to aid understanding of the artwork produced by Egypt's long and enduring civilisation. Greek, Roman and Christian objects were displayed together in one of the sections.
The museum in Boulaq opened in 1863 and was visited by European celebrities attending the ceremonies marking the opening of the Suez Canal. Later, a particularly high flood flowed into the basement, which necessitated the rapid removal of the whole collection. The treasures were transferred to an annexe of the Giza Palace of Ismail, now the faculty of engineering of Cairo University.
As a result of this, and due to the rapidly increasing number of discoveries resulting from excavations all over Egypt, building a new museum became an urgent necessity. In 1896 a tender went out inviting bids for the construction of a suitable museum for the treasured objects from Egypt's past.
A year later, a design by the French architect Marcel Dourgnon was accepted and the foundation stone of the Egyptian Museum was laid in Qasr Al-Nil (today's Tahrir Square). It took four years for the magnificent neo- classical museum building to be completed.
Its two storeys, arranged around an atrium, held more than a hundred rooms, while a vast basement housed the artefacts that continued to flow into Cairo from excavations around the country. The transfer of the collection from Giza to the new location began in March 1902. The design of the new museum was such that the treasures could be arranged chronologically on the ground floor and by object type on the first floor. Initially there were 120,000 objects on display, and the museum was unique of its kind in presenting the whole course of development of a single civilisation from the pre-dynastic through to the Roman period. The ground floor enabled the visitor to follow the development of Egyptian art, particularly in the fields of sculpture and the graphic arts, with a variety of columns, burial chambers, small chapels and other architectural features, along with large stone sarcophagi. In the graphic arts, the museum was so planned that the visitor could appreciate the wide range of bas-reliefs and fragments of paintings. The gala opening was attended by Khedive Abbass Helmi II, and the French archaeologist Gaston Maspero, Mariette's successor, became the Egyptian Museum's first director.
The rapid increase in the size of the collections, especially following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 and the equally impressive objects found in the royal necropolis of Tanis -- not to mention the thousands of statues, sphinxes and sacred animals in stone and bronze found in the Karnak cachette (the bronze items alone numbered 17,000) -- resulted in the need to reorganise the exhibits time and again. Display cabinets became overcrowded. One way to solve the problem was to encourage the transference of some selected pieces to the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria and the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo. Later it was decided to transfer to provincial museums such as Mallawi, Luxor, and later Aswan, objects that had been discovered during excavations in those locations. And still antiquities flowed into the Egyptian Museum as, indeed, they continue to do.
When the Grand Museum of Egyptian Heritage is built on a 150-acre plot of land at Giza, near the beginning of the road to Alexandria -- the tenders for which will be opened in October -- it will be unique in covering the full span of Egyptian history, this time from pre-dynastic to modern times. Some of the most characteristic objects from each period of Pharaonic history will be selected from the Egyptian Museum for exhibition, especially examples of Egyptian art and craftsmanship.
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