In fact, I think I have the journal that I kept during that trip. Let me run upstairs and rummage through the bookshelves in my bedroom . . . hold on . . . yes, here it is! Lots about Egypt which I will share with you in future blogs, but nothing about the Egyptian Museum except for . . .my memory: a vast museum full of huge white stone statues, pedestals taller than we could reach, alabaster pottery, delicately hand carved figures, all jammed into every possible corner, no labels, just beautiful, magnificent Egyptian antiquary. Certainly no military presence! The collection in Cairo put the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's Egyptian collection to shame! [A friendly rogue once labeled an elegant sparsely set out museum in the United States, պարապ թանգարան - barab tankaran -- an empty museum. He must have been accustomed to museums like the one in Cairo.) Gail -- if you have any memories of the Museum we visited in Cairo, please comment! More on Egypt 1964 tomorrow. I promise!
i know this is sacriligeous and maybe a little bit too revealing of the cultural paucity in which i live, but i could not help think of Uncle Scrooge's dwelling above ground where the floor boards groaned under the weight of his cache of specie and paper gold hoard. there was no quantifying of it, because there was so much of it, and that was the measure of the man and his stache. granted, it might be easier to say that the egyptians lacked the order of Germans, or the dedicated fascination of the English, and were overwhelmed by the plethora of their cultural physical inheritance. after all they had the pyramids. they had the sphinx, the tombs, the temples, cities that were 4-5 thousand years old, some submerged in the sand, and some partially. could anything contained in a building compete with that? how could a museum worker feel there was gravity to his work, to his calling, when all he had to do was step outside, and the museum, the real museum was all around him.
ReplyDelete@hagop bedrosGreat insight! Or outsight when you say, "The real museum was all around him!"
ReplyDeleteSome museums lack the resources to research, catalogue and display. I'm glad that at least some of these precious antiquities are enclosed / protected from the elements.
ReplyDeleteAs Hagop Bedros quips, the stage / museum (of life) is our indoor and outdoor views and experiences. . . isn't a picture worth a thousand words!
I took a look at the Cairo Museum on the internet a few moments ago and it now looks quite organized -- not at all what I remember from the early 1960's!
ReplyDeleteit must be the germans, they are everywhere!
ReplyDeleteI will check out the internet site for the museum - And will report if it is one of the museums that you can now visit with Google Earth!
ReplyDeleteUpdate on the internet presence of the museum - no luck with google earth other than the exterior, google image search turned up lots of shots of items in the museum, and an account of efforts to protect antiquities during the current uprising is here:
ReplyDeletehttp://phdiva.blogspot.com/2011/01/egypt-museums-and-archaeology-news.html
The Cairo Museum: We’d deliberately put off going to the Cairo Museum. We’d saved it up.
ReplyDeleteFirst we had soaked up the land and its history by being there, walking, talking, looking at pyramids and the Nile, and watching the water buffalo walking round and round the wells. We saw the tombs of the kings and the monumental ruins of Luxor.
Finally, we thought, we’d enjoy a synthesis of it all at the Cairo Museum. We found no light, no organization, lots of dust.
The shock of finding the treasures of Egypt lying about in the same condition they must have been when found jumbled in the tombs, sent us into girlish giggles. We gulped with the effort of holding them back and gave into new bursts. The dust we disturbed made us sneeze. We could be heard, we feared, throughout the building.