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Egyptian Museum


Main entrance of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
The Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Egypt – strictly, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities – is home to the most extensive collection of Pharaonic antiquities in the world. It has 136,000 items on display, with many more hundreds of thousands in its basement storerooms.

The museum was founded by Auguste Mariette in 1858, and it relocated to its current neoclassical building in 1902.

The highlights are the tomb artefacts of King Tutankhamen, whose almost intact tomb was found by Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings in 1923.

The museum's Royal Mummy Room, containing 27 royal mummies from Pharaonic times, was closed down on the orders of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. It was reopened, with a slightly curtailed display of New Kingdom kings and queens, in 1985.

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