[CPProt.net] Housecleaning at Egypt museum

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Housecleaning at Egypt museum 
By Michael Slackman The New York Times 
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2005

 
CAIRO 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 secretary general 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
lightbulbs 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 B.C. There are the treasures of the young
Pharaoh Tutankhamen, the golden chariot and the golden mask.
 
Nearly two years ago, officials hired a company to begin to clean out the
basement and convert some of the space into an exhibition area. Last year,
Hawass decided that a more precise accounting was needed, so he sent 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. In one,
Abdel Razek said, the team discovered parts of the palace of Pharaoh
Merenptah, which dates to the 19th Dynasty (1307 B.C. to 1196 B.C.) and was
unearthed by a team from the University of Pennsylvania around 1915. 
 
"It's like we are excavating," she said.
 
The work was proceeding quietly until early October, when the museum
discovered that three statues dating from the Old Kingdom era (2649 B.C. to
2152 B.C.) 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.
 
"The basement is like an antiquities graveyard," he said.
 
One day last month, he took a small group through the basement, including a
few journalists, academics and museum officials, to show off his latest
project. He promises that within a year, the inventory will be completed and
the area transformed into a proper storage facility with shelves and air
conditioning.
 
Right now, it is a mess. There are human remains on shelves, human skulls
sitting in crates, tablets and amulets and bowls and jars scattered here and
there.
 
In one corner, Abdel Razek points out half a dozen intricately painted
coffins. When she first entered the area, she said, they were strewn about,
and each was covered in such a heavy layer of dirt that it was impossible to
tell what it was.
 
A cursory cleaning revealed these to be the coffins of the priests of Amon,
the king of the gods. The priests were interred nearly 3,000 years ago. The
mummies were discovered in crates nearby.
 
 http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/01/news/museum.php
 
Abeer Allam contributed reporting for this article.