Ă‚ÂŁ200m new home for Tutankhamun
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Egyptian Gazette 6 March, 2004 The sands of Giza have yet to see the first bulldozer,
but soon they will part to make way for what Egyptian archaeologists predict will be the “mother of museums”.
Within sight of the great Pyramids, the planned £200 million Grand Museum of Egypt will house 100,000 of the nation’s ancient treasures, many of which now languish unseen in storerooms around the country.
It will, the Egyptian authorities say, be the largest archaeological museum in the world and is expected to draw three million visitors a year.
The prize exhibit will be the 3,850-piece Tutankhamun collection, the priceless funerary hoard discovered intact by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922 and which is now in Cairo’s venerable but ageing Egyptian Museum.
World-famous in its own right, the existing French Neo-Classical building was purpose-built in 1902 by Marcel Dourgnon, but is in one of the Egyptian capital’s busiest and most polluted squares. The Cairo Metro runs near its foundations, its galleries are too high and interconnected to allow effective air conditioning, and dust streams in through the windows.
Yet few of the tourists who file through its august galleries have any idea that two storeys beneath their feet a team of archaeologists is already at work, drawing up the list of artefacts to be transferred to the new building.
In his dungeon-like basement office, Mohamed Saleh, director of the proposed Grand Museum’s Egyptology unit, has spent the last five years working on the project. As co-ordinator of the joint Egyptian-Italian scientific committee responsible for selection of the treasures to be moved, he says that the panel agrees with 80 per cent of his choices, but insists that they intend to preserve the existing Cairo collection largely intact.
The earmarked site is 480,000 sq m (118 acres) of roadside semi-desert not far north of the 4,500-year-old great Pyramid of Cheops and its neighbours, whose peaks will be visible from the galleries. The museum, built to a competition- winning design by the Dublin-based architects Heneghan Peng, is scheduled for completion in December 2008.
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Partner country Egypt at ITB Berlin
Grand opening ceremony on 6 March 2012 – numerous cultural events with typical national attractions at the world’s largest travel trade show – interactive communication via Facebo (24/02/2012)
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