The first time I saw a truly remarkable museum was when I visited London in the mid-1970s. The British Museum was not only grandiose but each artifact was displayed in such a way that visitors felt they were seeing something special. I remember walking through the Ancient Egyptian section of the British Museum and noticing the impeccable detail taken when displaying and lighting each of the artifacts. For the first time I really could appreciate the splendor of ancient Egypt. I continued on to Paris and visited the Louvre and again I marveled at the way they displayed antiquity from ancient Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Since then I have also visited museums in Rome, Berlin, Madrid, and Washington, to name a few places, and no matter the size or how prestigious the museum, the common thread that has linked all of the ones I visited is the importance that the curators place on giving each artifact space and proper lighting.
A few years after that initial visit to London and Paris, I took a year off to tramp around Europe, Africa and the Middle East. When I arrived in Cairo it was only natural that one of the first things that I wanted to visit was the Egyptian Museum. I still had those lingering first impressions from the British Museum and the Louvre and I kind of took it for granted that the Egyptian displays I saw in London and Paris would be minute in comparison to what I was about to see.
When I first stepped inside the Egyptian Museum I was awestruck by the vast amount of artifacts that were crammed into every nook and cranny. Everywhere I looked there were giant statues climbing up the sides of the walls and sarcophagi and display tables covering the floor. Actually, it was so overwhelming that for the first few minutes I just stood at the entrance and stared at everything. There was no set way to visit the Cairo museum; one had just point themselves in a direction and walk — and that’s just what I did.
After setting off it didn’t take long for my initial feeling of “awe” to wear off. Suddenly, I realized that as impressive as everything was, it was like I was not walking through a museum but rather a glorified storage facility.
Rather than displaying half of the artifacts as best they could, the curators of the Egyptian Museum filled every space with as many items as possible in hopes that quantity would win over quality. And for almost 100 years that way of thinking actually worked. Since the museum’s inauguration in 1902 not much has changed in the way Egyptian antiquity has been displayed. For the most part, the vast majority of visitors to the Cairo Museum have been awed by the sheer quantity of artifacts on display and for the Egyptians that has been good enough. But pull any visitor aside and they will tell you that the museum is just too cluttered and the displays are outdated.
Egypt is not alone in that way of thinking. Since my first visit to the Middle East in the 1970s, I have continued to traverse the Arab world and I have found a similar scenario played out at each museum I’ve visited from Baghdad to Casablanca. Granted, many of the countries I went to were either in a state of war at the time or had just ended years of conflict. But in countries like Egypt, Syria or Tunisia, where tourism plays such an important part of their economy, I was amazed to see the poor state of the museums. Even in the Iraq of the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was investing heavily into preserving the grandeur of Iraq’s ancient civilization, the the museums along the Tigris and Euphrates were in an abominable state.
The first real noticeable change, that I can remember, came when the first Mummy Room opened at the Cairo Museum in 1994. For the first time care was taken into the display and the lighting of each individual mummy. That little extra attention didn’t come with the admission ticket though — if you wanted to see the Mummy Room you had to pay extra. A few years later, in 1997, this “new” approach was finally taken a step further when the Nubian Museum in Aswan opened. For the first time there was a museum in the Arab world comparable to any museum in Europe or America. Since then a number of other smaller museums have opened and a second Cairo Museum is planned that will help ease the congestion of the first.
Hopefully, with this new Cairo Museum there will also be a change in mentality as well and an asserted effort to highlight the beauty of each individual item and not think that by cramming a room full of antiquity you can fool visitors for another 100 years.
Norbert schiller is a Dubai-based photo-journalist and writer
