Cairo, Egypt: The Egyptian Museum - Rick Steves’ Europe Travel Guide - Travel Bite

A visit to Cairo's Egyptian Museum helps bring the country's many ancient sites to life. Along with the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, this museum shows off the best collection of ancient Egyptian art anywhere. The core of the collection, art from the age of the pharaohs, dates from about 3,000 to 1,000 BC. Nearly everything filling these old halls is funerary art, art designed to help save the souls of the pharaohs. Statues filled with symbolism, written prayers, and offerings to deal with the gods and help assure a happy transition into the afterlife. This ancient art is so well-preserved because most of it was hidden away for 4,000 years, dark and dry, in tombs. This portrayal of geese from 2,500 BC is perhaps the oldest surviving painting. This seated scribe recalls the importance of the educated elite in the court of an often illiterate king. And this couple, a husband and wife, was also found in a tomb. It's all art for the dead, locked up until rediscovered in modern times. Many mummies patiently await your visit. Ancient Egyptians preserved bodies through a complex process of mummification in hopes that the soul could re-inhabit it in the next world. And the coffins were elaborately painted with an inventory of things that hopefully would accompany the body and with prayers to be sure all went as planned. The art looks essentially the same from century to century. A remarkable thing about ancient Egyptian art and society as a whole was its stability. For 2,000 years, from 3,000 to 1,000 BC, relative to other times and other cultures, very little changed. Religion permeated Egyptian society. As long as things were going reasonably well, the gods were happy, and it was status quo. Every year, the Nile would flood, bringing water and fertile silt to the land. When the gods are happy, the people have food, and you don't change things. And the pharaoh was considered a god. If your leader is a god, you question nothing. You obey the rules. Things stay the same. Akhenaten was the one exception in a 2,000-year line of conformist pharaohs. Rather than the same predictable, idealized features, Akhenaten had his own voluptuous looks, from a strangely curvaceous body to big, sensuous lips. Ruling around 1400 BC, he was considered history's first monotheist. Akhenaten replaced all the gods of the Egyptian pantheon with one all-powerful being, the sun god, whom he called Aten. In reliefs from the reign of Akhenaten, we see Aten, the sun, shining down on everything. During the time of Akhenaten, people were portrayed looser, more intimately. Casual family scenes must be from the time of Akhenaten.