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~CAIRO~
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EGYPT, CAIRO FAMILY
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We were privileged to examine the exquisite and extensive collection of blessedly well preserved art in the famous Cairo Museum in the company of an Egyptologist. Some of the pieces were so stunning and affected me so deeply that I found myself somewhat disinterested in their historical background. My emotional response to them was so great that I simply wished to be with the feelings that they created within me. They deserved my full attention and appreciation as the individual masterpieces that they were; even apart from their grand place within the history of their country.
The dusty museum had quite a different feel to it than the quality of the museums in America. Mysterious crates and boxes sat along the walls behind many of the main exhibits taunting me, enticing me to peek inside. Nothing felt modern or efficiently categorized and classified, cases were not well sealed and indeed many of the inscriptions defining the priceless objects were long ago typed on white paper that is now a dingy, faded yellow. I appreciated that many objects did indeed at least have descriptions in English that were basically understandable.
While traversing the endless halls and multiple floors of the museum, the enormity of the time span of the Egyptian culture became apparent to me. We are often used to thinking in terms of hundreds of years when considering history in the USA, yet indeed the Temple of Luxor itself was built over the span of more than a millennium. I tried to absorb this timeline and the layers and layers that it created energetically. It is still hard to fathom. To even give a cursory glance to all of the objects on display within the Cairo Museum would undoubtedly require months. The sheer scope of the collection is amazing. Any one object rightly deserves to be honored as well as carefully observed. So many precious artifacts called to me, inviting their discovery.
We eventually made our way to the collection of royal mummies. A separate fee was required to enter this softly lit room where tourists whispered their respect for the pharaohs and their queens. Peering into the cases, the mummies were creepy and grotesquely desiccated. Their intact hair and teeth reminded us of their place within the family of humanity. Their appearance, partially unwrapped and unadorned as they were, does not speak of nobility nor glittering fortune, but of mortal beings. Their ritualistic preservation, the subject of films, fantasies and nightmares, attracts yet repels us.
The "heretic" Pharaoh Akhenaten long fascinated Daniel, and we lingered in the wing of museum dedicated to him. The artifacts from his reign broke with a traditional style preferred by the pharaohs and depicted Akhenaten in scenes with his family. This revolutionary pharaoh, responsible for shifting the power structure that had endured for thousands of years before him, reigned around 1350 B.C. He rocked Egypt by declaring that the old gods could no longer be worshiped and that the Amun priests no longer held power.
He alone could communicate with the new and exclusive God, the Sun disk. He moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes to Tell al-Amarna, a city which was destroyed soon after his reign, along with the heretical changes that he had introduced to Egypt. His outwardly feminine appearance, which he chose to have depicted in his many likenesses, has led to much speculation and few conclusions among Egyptologists. Of his many wives the most famous was Nefertiti; though she most likely was not the mother of the son that succeeded him, the child-Pharaoh Tutankhamen.
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