Egyptian archaeologists, who normally scour the desert in search of treasures of the past, have discovered that one of the greatest caches of antiquities may well be in the basement of the Egyptian Museum.
For the past century, artifacts have been stored away in crates there and forgotten, often allowed to disintegrate in the dank, dusty cavern.
Forgotten until now. The recent theft and recovery of three statues from the basement have prompted antiquity officials in Egypt to increase an effort already under way to complete the first comprehensive inventory of artifacts in the basement.
"For the last 100 years, curators sat down to drink tea, but they did not do their jobs," said Zahi Hawass, the general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. "How many artifacts are in the basement? It was awful."
Step through a small, Hobbit-sized door, down a steep flight of stairs and through a locked gate. The basement is a maze of arched passageways and bare light bulbs hanging from decaying wires. It is packed with wooden crates, hundreds of them, sometimes piled floor to ceiling.
Cobwebs cling to ancient pottery and tablets engraved with hieroglyphics. Six hundred coffins and 170 mummies have been found so far. No one knows what may have been stolen over the years.
Last year, officials reported that 38 golden bracelets from Roman times had vanished from the basement, apparently six years earlier.
"It is an accumulation of 100 years of neglect," said Ali Radwan, a professor of Egyptology at Cairo University who took a recent tour of the basement. "It is not appropriate for a country like Egypt to have such miserable storage for its history."
The Egyptian Museum is a 104-year-old repository of some of the world's most famous antiquities. Inside, there are the mummified remains of pharaohs, like Ramses II, who died in 1212 BC. There are the treasures of the young Pharaoh Tutankhamen, the golden chariot and the golden mask.
Built and designed by the French, the two-story building in central Tahrir Square has changed little over the decades. It remains crowded with an estimated 120,000 items, most of which have also never been properly inventoried, museum officials said. And even the exhibition areas can be haphazardly arranged: Some of the labels date to colonial times, and some items are not labeled at all.
Certainly the Egyptian museum is not alone in its struggle to keep up with a vast collection acquired over so many years -- though the scope of the problem here may be unrivaled.
Nearly two years ago, antiquity officials hired a company to begin to clean out the basement and to convert some of the space into an exhibition area. Last year, Hawass decided that a more precise accounting was needed, so he sent in a team of curators to do a complete inventory.
It was a slow process in very difficult working conditions. There is little ventilation, poor lighting and dust -- lots and lots of dust. So far 22,000 items have been inventoried -- about 20 percent of what is actually in the basement, said Sabah Abdel Razek, the curator overseeing the job.
The team never knows what it will find when a crate is cracked open.
"It's like we are excavating," Abdel Razek said.
The work was proceeding quietly until early last month, when the museum discovered that three statues dating from the Old Kingdom era (2649 BC to 2152 BC) were missing. Initially, Hawass insisted that the pieces could not have been stolen.
But after curators scoured the basement for more than a week, the tourism and antiquities police arrested two men from the cleanup crew. They told the police that the statues were left in a corner for three days so they thought no one wanted them. They smuggled them out of the museum with construction debris, officials said.
After all the embarrassing publicity, Hawass decided to declare that it was time -- once and for all -- to put the basement in order.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS