Story
The story of Egyptian Museum
Picture the summer of 1902: five thousand wooden carts and two trains making about nineteen round trips, hauling Egypt's treasures from a palace in Giza to this building on Tahrir Square. The first shipment alone carried approximately 48 stone coffins weighing over 1,000 tons. The museum's journey had been long.
An earlier collection near the Ezbekieh Garden dwindled, and its last hall in the Citadel was given away in 1855 to an Austrian archduke. Auguste Mariette then opened a museum at Boulaq, but an 1878 Nile flood damaged it, and he pleaded for a permanent home away from the water. The French architect Marcel Dourgnon designed this one, the foundation stone was laid on 1 April 1897, and it opened on 15 November 1902. Mariette got his wish to rest among the objects he collected: his tomb lies in the garden.
Inside are over 170,000 items, the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in the world.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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