Tut's new digs

The sands of Giza have yet to see the first bulldozer, but soon they will part to make way for what Egyptian archaeologists predict will be the “mother of museums”.

Within sight of the great Pyramids, the planned £200 million Grand Museum of Egypt will house 100,000 of the nation’s ancient treasures, many of which now languish unseen in storerooms around the country. . .

The prize exhibit will be the 3,850-piece Tutankhamun collection, the priceless funerary hoard discovered intact by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922 and which is now in Cairo’s venerable but ageing Egyptian Museum.

World-famous in its own right, the existing French Neo-Classical building was purpose-built in 1902 by Marcel Dourgnon, but is in one of the Egyptian capital’s busiest and most polluted squares. The Cairo Metro runs near its foundations, its galleries are too high and interconnected to allow effective air conditioning, and dust streams in through the windows.

The new museum is scheduled to be completed at the end of 2008. From the Times of London.

Posted by David on February 28, 2004 5:29 PM