151.
The Cairo Museum is old and dusty, the lighting is terrible and you have to pay extra to go into the “mummy room”--which is a disappointing rip off!
In several glass cases, cigar boxes filled with unlabeled stuff molder away; museum guards are forever whispering “Psssst! Would you like to buy an authentic…” whatever, and offering some fake antiquity for sale.
Even so, this building has more authentic treasures per square inch than any museum I have ever visited.
It seems sort of a shame that the current inheritors of vanished glory make their living showing off the artifacts of that vanished glory to tourists.
Obviously the current human residents of Cairo and the Giza suburb are not the ever-so great grandchildren of the noble designers, builders and people of the classic Egyptian civilization—or, if they are, they have degenerated beyond recall.
Strange, isn’t it? I was struck by this phenomenon first at the archaeological sites in Mexico then in Bolivia and Peru and now see it quite dramatically here. The creative innovators are replaced in less than one generation by bureaucrats who are replaced, after a suitable period of years--allowing for the collapse of the bureaucracy--by tour guides and t-shirt salesmen. This seems to me to be the true March of Civilization.
Still, it does me some sort of good to look at this stuff; it satisfies me somehow.
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