EGYPTIAN MUSEUM

Museum containing the world's finest collection of pharaonic antiquities.

In 1858 the Ottoman Empire's viceroy of Egypt, Saʿid Pasha, commissioned French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette to create an antiquities service and a museum. In 1863 Saʿid's successor, Ismaʿil Pasha, inaugurated the Egyptian Museum in the Bulaq district of Cairo. The museum was moved to Giza in 1891, then to its present building in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 1902. Gaston Maspéro succeeded Mariette as director of the museum and the antiquities service in 1881. For ninety-four years, until the 1952 revolution, all directors of the service were French. In 1954 Mustafa Amir took over as the first Egyptian director. The museum gradually relegated subsidiary collections to the Greco-Roman, Arab (later called Islamic), and Coptic museums. Since the 1920s, the Tutankhamen collection has been the museum's greatest treasure. The present building has been overcrowded almost since it opened. A 1925 proposal by U.S. Egyptolo-gist James Henry Breasted and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to fund a more spacious new museum foundered on political grounds. In 2001 an international competition was announced for the design of a UNESCO-sponsored Grand Egyptian Museum on a site just north of the Giza pyramids plateau.

See also Archaeology in the Middle East; Mariette, Auguste; MaspÉro, Gaston.

Bibliography

Bongioanni, A., and Croce, M. S., eds. The Illustrated Guide to the Egyptian Museum. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2001.

Al-Misri, Mathaf; De Luca, Araldo; Tiradritti, Francesco; and Mubarak, Suzanne. Egyptian Treasures from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

Reid, Donald Malcolm. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

donald malcolm reid