Reorganizing the Egyptian Museum

Few outsiders appreciate what a task it is to keep track of even a small museum's holdings -- and how often the necessary resources are lacking. This was touched upon in the wake of the looting in Baghdad, but is generally applicable to all great archeological museums, as this Reuters report illustrates:

Egypt is about to begin the painstaking five-year task of cataloguing and restoring some 90,000 pharaonic and other artefacts which have lain almost forgotten for decades since they were dug from ancient ruins.

Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities, said on Sunday that work started about three weeks ago to move the artefacts, now in the basement of the country's main museum, into storage elsewhere. . .

Hawass said the more than 100-year-old museum had been the store for most finds from foreign archaeological digs since it was built, but poor curatorship meant items were often difficult to find or lost amidst the piles of boxes.

"The basement in Cairo museum is like a maze of corridors... No one knows anything about it," he told Reuters.

A search is currently under way for 36 Roman bracelets, discovered in 1905, which have apparently disappeared. Hawass said they were last recorded as part of a exhibition that returned from Japan in 1984.

Posted by David on June 7, 2004 2:42 PM