Egypt inaugurates two new museums at Cairo International Airport
Collections of artefacts will be on display in Terminal 2 and Terminal 3
May 19, 2021
Egypt inaugurated two museums in Cairo International Airport with two well-preserved mummies as their main attraction.
The new museums, in terminals 2 and 3, will give travellers a “glimpse of Egypt’s treasures”, according to the Tourism and Antiquities Ministry.
Artefacts on display at the museums were chosen to represent Egypt's Pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Coptic and Islamic eras.
The exhibits were drawn from storage facilities of the Egyptian Museum at Cairo's Tahrir Square, a museum in the Red Sea city of Suez and the Greco-Roman Museum in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, according to Moamen Othman, head of the ministry’s museums department.
Tuesday's inauguration was designed to mark International Museum Day, which falls on May 18.
The collections were chosen by the Tourism Ministry's Supreme Committee for Museums.
The museums' which were also attended by Egypt’s Civil Aviation Minister Mohamed Manar, took place on Tuesday morning.
government announced early in 2020 that it intended to open a museum at Cairo’s airport as part of its efforts to boost the country’s tourism, which was hit hard by Covid-19.
The museum's space was initially allocated to a 60-square-meter area in Terminal 3 in 2016, however it was later expanded to 150 square meters. Terminal 2's museum is the same size.
Among the museum’s most prominent exhibits are two well-preserved mummies.
The face of one mummy, from the Roman era, is covered in a gilded mask and decorated with colourful drawings.
The other comes from the Late Dynastic period of ancient Egypt and depicts a man in the Osiris position, with the feet together and the arms crossed at the wrists over the centre of the chest.
Mr Othman said one of the most important pieces on display was a bronze statue of the winged goddess Isis, wearing the two horns of Hathor with the sun disc between them.
The exhibits include a group of canopic jars from ancient Egypt, small pieces from the Islamic and Coptic periods and a group of portraits from the Late period.
Tickets to the museum cost EGP 50 ($3) for foreigners and EGP 25 ($1.5) for Egyptians.
In celebration of International Museum Day, Sharm El Sheikh Museum launched the “I Can” initiative in collaboration with a group of young volunteers in South Sinai.
They will boost tourism to the governorate, home to some of the Red Sea’s most popular beach destinations.
Through this initiative, archaeologists at the museum gave educational tours to students from an international school in the area, teaching them the significance of the artefacts housed at the museum.
The students will be given the chance to show what they learnt through a tour in which they will act as guides and pass on their knowledge to museum visitors.
The student tours will be conducted in languages including English, Russian and Italian.
International Museum Day is taking place this year under the theme "The Future of Museums, Recovery and Reimagining".
Updated: May 19, 2021 05:57 PM
