Wakeup call sounds at 4.30 pm.

At 4.30 pm???

Yes, we´re in a Moslem country. First prayer is at this 'ungodly' hour and it blasts from the minarete across the street dircetly into our hotel room. If I want sleep to remain a possibilty, I have to learn quickly to use earplugs .

The minarete outside our room

And sleep at night is needed during this trip where every day is so filled with new impressions and experiences of a kind you never dreamt that you would survive to witness. True, I have stayed a Moslem country before, for several months even, but that was long ago, and you change, you forget and you grow older. Besides that was not ancient Kemet.

Our first look outside the hotel this first of mornings revealed a Mama Bast tending her kittens on the little roof made of reed shading the neighbour´s garden house. We took that too as a good sign.

I find my notes are jumbled here, I´m skipping some mundane things to quickly get to the Cairo Museum.

The wonders of the Cairo Museum are too many to remember. We spent all day there, we remained there while the group was going to the Khan el Kahalili. This trip was for the ancient things, next time we can go shopping in bazars ;). Among the marvels we saw was the Narmer Palette, so much bigger than I had imagined (64 x 42 cm). It is a miracle that it has survived for so long undamaged except for one small chip on the front side. It is displayed at the bottom floor, in a simple glass case in an almost offhand way. There is nothing to really call the attention to its importance for Egyptian history, you have to know what it is bforehand or it will just remain another beautiful object with no paticular significance.

And we visited the Royal Mummy Room.

So this simple little person has stood before the Great Kings of ancient Kemet: Thutmose III, Seti I, Ramses II to name a few. There in the Royal Mummy Room they are alid out in glass cases. You become humbled and thoughtful. But also saddened for they lack any sign of their past significance, they lack any and everything except a tiny little label with their names. Thutmose III didn´t even have that. Their display is too far from their once so magnificent appearance.

I would have wanted to see them in a framing somewhat more worthy of their past greatness. In a context more Royal than the mere linen wrappings. There should have been ostrich feathers surrounding them, cartouches in beautiful colors should have been displayed beside their glass cases, there should have - if not the real thing, then replicas of the fledge and crook, and their Fivefold Titulary should have been spelled out by each of them for all to see.

I´m only mentioning a few of the other things we saw, it really says very little to repeat it without any photographs, and cameras were not allowed into the museum. We saw the wonderful little models from the tomb of Meketre (11 Dyn) of boats, herding and counting of cattle, shops for weaving, brewing of beer, carpentry, and the armies of soldiers found in the tomb of Mesehti. We admired the statue of Mentuhotep I in the red Deshretcrown. The beautiful triad with MenKauRe, Het-Hert and a Nome deity exists in a couple of different variants, we passed them too, and they were much smaller than I had imagined. The wonderful sarcophagus in red granite which had been Hatshepsut´s. On another sarcophagi you could see where some glyphs in a cartouche had been carved away and replaced with others to form a different name. A faint depression could be discerned. The beautifully painted chapel where the Het-Hert cow had been pulled forward so that the paintings could be seen better. Whose tomb was it from, I don´t remember. We went through a room filled from top to bottom with wonderful little statues of all the deities, they seemed to yell at me to stop and discover, but at that point we had to move on.

This was one of the first days of our trip. When we returned to Cairo two weeks later we visited the museum again. At this time I found the golden Horus head from Hierakonpolis, it was displayed in its own glass case and actually together with a set of clarifying texts. Iit´s fairly small and mounted on a wooden bird´s body for better enhancing. I also went to see the jewellery rooms a second time, since they had been too crowded the first time. I´ve never before been particularly interested in jewellery but now, when I could see it in real life the level of artistry got home to me as throroughly amazing.

On the whole, my impression of the Cairo Museum is that it needs some reworking. It is, what we called at the museum where I used to work, a 'buttonology museum' which means artifacts are displayed in rows upon rows with small dusty, yellowed labels which say nothing apart from provenance or age. Nothing about use, context etc. I also understood that the magazines are veritable heaps of cases whicih have not been opened for maybe a hundred or so years. Excavations could in fact be made within the museum itself! But to be fair, the rooms for the treasures of Tutankhamon and for other royal jewellery were of better standard though even here there were no clarifying texts. A new museum is in the making I believe. It will be interesting to see what will happen!