Showing posts with label Cairo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cairo. Show all posts

Monday, June 11, 2018

Egypt, Cairo, Egyptian Museum

 The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, known commonly as the Egyptian Museum or Museum of Cairo, in Cairo, Egypt, is home to an extensive collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities. It has 120,000 items, with a representative amount on display, the remainder in storerooms.

The Egyptian Museum of Antiquities contains many important pieces of ancient Egyptian history. It houses the world’s largest collection of Pharaonic antiquities. The Egyptian government established the museum built in 1835 near the Ezbekeyah Garden and later moved to the Cairo Citadel.

In 1855, Archduke Maximilian of Austria was given all of the artifacts by the Egyptian government; these are now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

A new museum was established at Boulaq in 1858 in a former warehouse, following the foundation of the new Antiquities Department under the direction of Auguste Mariette.

The building lay on the bank of the Nile River, and in 1878 it suffered significant damage in a flood of the Nile River. In 1891, the collections were moved to a former royal palace, in the Giza district of Cairo.They remained there until 1902 when they were moved, for the last time, to the current museum in Tahrir Square.

Museum
During the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the museum was broken into, and two mummies were destroyed. Several artifacts were also shown to have been damaged. Around 50 objects were lost.Since then 25 objects have been found.
Those that were restored were put on display in September 2013 in an exhibition entitled Damaged and Restored. Among the displayed artifacts are two statues of King Tutankhamun made of cedar wood and covered with gold, a statue of King Akhenaten, ushabti statues that belonged to the Nubian kings, a mummy of a child and a small polychrome glass vase.

Some of the stones at Cairo Museum are still emitting some sort of sound that makes audio recording to fail.



Interior design

There are two main floors in the museum, the ground floor and the first floor. On the ground floor there is an extensive collection of papyrus and coins used in the Ancient world. The numerous pieces of papyrus are generally small fragments, due to their decay over the past two millennia. Several languages are found on these pieces, including Greek, Latin, Arabic, and ancient Egyptian.


The coins found on this floor are made of many different metals, including gold, silver, and bronze. The coins are not only Egyptian, but also Greek, Roman, and Islamic. This has helped historians research the history of Ancient Egyptian trade.

Also on the ground floor are artifacts from the New Kingdom, the time period between 1550 and 1069 BC. These artifacts are generally larger than items created in earlier centuries. Those items include statues, tables, and coffins (sarcophagi), it also contains 42 rooms, upon entering through the security check in the building, one looks toward the atrium and the rear of the building with many items on view from sarcophagi and boats to enormous statues.

On the first floor there are artifacts from the final two dynasties of Egypt, including items from the tombs of the Pharaohs Thutmosis III, Thutmosis IV, Amenophis II, Hatshepsut, and the courtier Maiherpri, as well as many artifacts from the Valley of the Kings, in particular the material from the intact tombs of Tutankhamun and Psusennes I. Two special rooms contain a number of mummies of kings and other royal family members of the New Kingdom.



Khufu

Khufu (/ˈkf/, full name Khnum Khufu (/ˈknmˈkf/), known to the Greeks as Cheops, was an ancient Egyptian monarch who ruled during the Fourth Dynasty, in the first half of the Old Kingdom period (26th century BC). Khufu was the second ruler of the 4th dynasty; he followed his possible father, king Sneferu, on the throne. He is generally accepted as having commissioned the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but many other aspects of his reign are rather poorly documented. 

This fact prove that the pyramid was not built by him. Actually Secharia Sitchin discovered that the cartush with his name on the pyramid was a fake and had a letter from a grand grand father of a english person that "worked " in 18 hundreds in paiting the cartush on the interior wall of the pyramid to prove that they discovered something so that the funds continue to come from England for escavation in Egypt.



 The only completely preserved portrait of the king is a three-inch high ivory figurine found in a temple ruin of a later period at Abydos in 1903. All other reliefs and statues were found in fragments, and many buildings of Khufu are lost. Everything known about Khufu comes from inscriptions in his necropolis at Giza and later documents. For example, Khufu is the main character noted in the Papyrus Westcar from the 13th dynasty

 Tutankhamon

Tutankhamun ruled after the Amarna age, when the pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s probable father, turned the religious attention of the kingdom to the worship of the god Aten, the sun disc. 

Akhenaten moved his capital city to the site of Akhetaten (also known as Amarna), in Middle Egypt—far from the previous pharaoh’s capital. After Akhenaton’s death and the rule of a short-lived pharaoh, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamen shifted the focus of the country’s worship back to the god Amun and returned the religious center back to Thebes.Tutankhamun married his half-sister, Ankhesenamun, but they did not produce an heir. 

This left the line of succession  unclear. Tutankhamun died at the young age of eighteen, leading many scholars to speculate on the manner of his death—chariot accident, murder by blow to the head, and even a hippopotamus attack! The answer is still unclear. Tutankhamun’s much-older advisor (and possible step-grandfather), Ay, married the widowed Ankhesenamun and became pharaoh. 


The image of the pharaoh is that of a god. The gods were thought to have skin of gold, bones of silver, and hair of lapis lazuli—so the king is shown here in his divine form in the afterlife. He holds the crook and flail, symbols of the king’s right to rule. The goddesses Nekhbet (vulture) and Wadjet (cobra), inlaid with semiprecious stones, stretch their wings across his torso. Beneath these goddesses are two more—Isis and Nephthys—etched into the gold lid.



Egyptian Museum in Cairo and simply stared hard at one of the most famous artifacts on Earth— Tutankhamun’s golden funerary mask.

This marvelous, life size mask, of excellent workmanship, protected the head of Tutankhamon's mummy. His shoulders and the back of his mask are inscribed with a magic formula that ensures protection. The golden nemes headdress is striped in blue and green while the uraeus and vulture head, in gold inlaid with semi-precious stones and colored glass, ornament the brow.

The mask's eyes are made of obsidian and quartz with a touch of red at the corners. The divine beard, is made of cloisonn work. The ears are pierced for the wearing of earrings. The wide necklace collar is formed of rows of lapis lazuli, quartz, amazonite and colored glass beads attached at each shoulder to a gold falcon's head ornamented with obsidian.

 Also at the Egyptian Museum we can see the gold plated sarcofagus of Tuthankamon.

 The King Tut Tomb
The tomb of Tutankhamun contained four gilded shrines nested one inside the other in order of decreasing size. Inside the innermost shrine was a red quartzite sarcophagus which protected three anthropoid coffins (man-shaped). The first two coffins were made of gilded wood but the final coffin was made of solid gold. The solid gold coffin housed the mummy of King Tut and his fabulous golden death mask.









 It contains three gold Anthropoid coffins nested within each other, like Russian dolls. Inside the final coffin is the mummy of the  Pharaoh Tutankhamun - King Tut - which was directly covered by his fabulous death mask.
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 The Canoptic Shrine if king TUT is a gold container .It was used to house the canoptic chest which itself contained four vessels bearing visceria of king Tt . ( His lungs, liver , stomac, and intestines) which were removed for practical purposes during the mumificaiton process.

The goddess Isis extends her protecting arms in  protective gesture across one of the outer walls of Tuthankhamon  There are other guardian dieties also defending the shrine ( one on each face of the shrine) Nephthys, Seket and Neith .Each one has been associated with one of the cardinals points of the compass.
 This is a rithual figure of king TUT raiding a papyrus raft hunting a hyppopotamus, and the containers vessels bearing the viscera of King TUT.




There are other gold funeral masks at the Egyptian Museum





A lot of gold jewlery. Jewlery were used by men and women, and each piece apparently has a meaning.







Alabaster Jars


 Alabaster parfume vase bellow.







 Ritual statue of Sekhmet ( the gold statue in the middle of 5) Discovered in 1922 was wrapped around the neck in two linnen cloths. Sekhemet was the wariorgod of upper Egypt and is shown with the head of a lioness and the body of a woman.

 The innermost coffin of Tutankhamon. This casket is made of pure gold















The Power of Sound

"Tutankhamun's trumpets are a pair of trumpets found in the burial chamber of Tutankhamun. The trumpets, one of sterling silver and one of bronze or copper, are considered to be the oldest operational trumpets in the world, and the only known surviving examples from ancient Egypt.
The trumpets were found in 1922 by Howard Carter during the excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb. The bronze trumpet was discovered in the tomb's antechamber in a large chest containing various military objects and walking sticks. The silver trumpet was subsequently found in the burial chamber."

"Silent for over 3,000 years, the trumpets were sounded before a live audience of an estimated 150 million listeners through an international BBC broadcast aired on 16 April 1939. "
A few months afterwards, World War II broke out....

" It has been said that the two trumpets contain "magical powers" and have the apparent ability to summon war. The evening they were first played in 1939, the power cut out at the Cairo museum five minutes before the scheduled air, and the BBC were forced to record the sounding of the trumpets by candlelight. 

Five months after the radio broadcast, Britain entered World War II and the war in Europe began.
The trumpets were again said to have been played before the 1967 Six-Day War, before the 1990 Gulf war, and most recently, the bronze trumpet was played one week before the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 by a Cairo museum staff member to a Japanese delegation. 

It was among items stolen from the Cairo museum during the Egyptian looting and riots of 2011, mysteriously returned to the museum some weeks later."



These are other trumpets I do not know if they are of Thutankamon I took the picture at the Egyptian Museum
Some of the trumpets were used to move stone with the help of sound.


Sfinx of Amenemhat III








Links

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/ancient-mediterranean-ap/ancient-egypt-ap/a/tutankhamuns-tomb