By Mursi Saad El-Din The UNESCO publication "International Museum" devoted an entire issue to Egyptian heritage recently. It contained articles by 19 experts specialising in all aspects of the topic. According to information in this issue there are some 23 museums in Egypt, and all are purely about our own civilisation. Going through this publication made me feel proud of our past, raising a question in my mind. Why is it that we do not have something like a Louvre, a Metropolitan, a Hermitage, Pergamon or a British Museum? All five leading establishments are concerned not only with their own national heritage, but with world civilisations, and they have objects and art works from different countries on show. To the best of my knowledge, in Egypt only one museum keeps international masterpieces: the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum, whose owner was, I believe, the only art collector in Egypt, perhaps even in the whole of the Arab world. Though I have read a news item in one of the London papers about an Arab collector in one of the Gulf States, who has been acquiring art objects with a view to starting an arts museum of his own. There is, of course, the Arab Dahesh Museum in New York, which has become home to academic European art. But this is a museum away from home. I have visited what have come to be called the big five: the Louvre in Paris with 35,000 art works, paintings and sculptures, including the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo, the British Museum in London with about seven million objects, including the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon marbles, the Metropolitan in New York with three million objects, including the Temple of Dendera, the Hermitage in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) which claims the largest collection of Rembrandts, impressionists and post impressionists, and the Berlin State Museums, including the Pergamon (which was in East Berlin before the fall of the wall), and the bust of Queen Nefertiti. During my 12-year stay in London, I visited the British Museum regularly, not only to see manifestations of world civilisations, but also to learn world history. To me the museums were a medium of learning not only the history of Egypt but also of the whole world. In a recent issue of the Sunday Times "Culture" supplement, and on the occasion of a 10-part BBC programme which shows what goes on behind the scene in the British Museum, Bryan Appleyard interviews the museum's director, Neil MacGreg. And the moral of the story is: "From Imperial war chest to global resource -- the British Museum's latest plan is to let anyone write their own history." The emphasis in the British Museum, claims the director, is "on universalism, on the collection not as a British narrative about world civilisations, but as a unique source from which civilisations could build their own narratives. [..] It is essential that different histories of the world should get written. At a simple level I was brought up with so little knowledge of what happened in India or China before European contact. I knew there had been great civilisations, but I never learnt anything about them. I suppose this was the case for a lot of people." Then he goes on to mention the case of Africa where "there was a standard view in about 1900 that there was this continent with no history before the Europeans at all. The arrival of the Benin bronzes started a complete rethinking". The new role of the British Museum has geopolitical implications, in Appleyard's words it has, for example, "played a part in opening China's eyes to the world by staging an Assian exhibition in Beijing, and a part in asserting African identity through a Kenyan exhibition in Nairobi". Two years ago the museum organised a big Persia exhibition, which happened only because of President Ahmadinejad agreement. The exhibition was intended "to counteract Western narratives that still play a part in today's politics". The museum is also organising in 2009 an exhibition about Shia Iran!
