Can the Culture Ministry's proposed rescue plan for the Egyptian Museum's basement stop its contents from disappearing, asks Nevine El-Aref The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, the first edifice in the region to be built as a museum, has been in the limelight since its construction in 1902. Behind its deep rose, neo-classical façade it houses the largest and most exquisite collection of antiquities from the great civilisation of Ancient Egypt. The rapid increase in the size of the collection, especially following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 and the equally impressive objects found in the royal necropolis of Tanis -- not to mention the thousands of statues, sphinxes and sacred animals in stone and bronze found in the Karnak cachette (the bronze items alone number 17,000) -- have resulted in the museum's display cabinets flowing over. The surplus is stored in the basement, but that too is crammed to the brim. Objects there are stored so haphazardly that many cannot be located, and some may even have gone missing. It has been reported that an important relief has been mislaid and 38 gold bracelets and rings have disappeared. This mayhem in the basement has pushed the Ministry of Culture to launch an ambitious three-year plan to protect the legendary storehouse. In the past, the crush was partly alleviated by encouraging the transfer of selected pieces to the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria and the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo. Later it was decided to send to provincial museums, such as Malawi, Luxor, and Aswan, objects that had been discovered during excavations in those locations. But antiquities still flowed into the Egyptian Museum, and they still continue to do so. After more than 100 years, the museum is a large storehouse of treasures, while its basement has become a repository for most of the finds unearthed by foreign and Egyptian excavation missions working at various archaeological sites, from Sinai in the north to Aswan in the south. Objects retrieved from abroad or from unlawful owners, and others seized by prosecutors and kept as evidence in theft-related cases, are also stored in the basement. "The Egyptian Museum is like a maze of corridors, and no one knows anything about its contents," said Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) Secretary-General Zahi Hawass. According to Hawass, poor documentation and inefficient curation are the reasons for the basement's chaos. Items are often hard to find among the piles of boxes, wooden plaques, dust and rubble. Hawass cited a statue of Aphrodite that he himself discovered 25 years ago on the Giza Plateau as an example of an artefact stored somewhere in the museum's basement that would be nearly impossible to find at present. Egyptologist Selim Hassan, who only succeeded in documenting 20,000 items, carried out the last accurate inventory and documentation project in 1959. A few similar attempts were subsequently made, and soon thereafter abandoned. In the 1980s, before the installation of a state-of-the-art security system, the basement was a rich quarry for antiquities robbers and smugglers, who infiltrated the building and sometimes spent the night roaming around and stealing treasures. "It really is a sad state of affairs," said Hawass, who promised that the situation in the basement would be ameliorated over the next three years. "In fact, it is going to be a revolutionary era for both the Egyptian Museum and all the country's storehouses," he said. The first phase of the rescue project started early this week. Dust, rubble and wooden plaques left over from a project to create a new exhibition space in part of the basement two years ago, have been brushed away. All the items stored in the basement will be moved, within the next three months, to a Giza storehouse, where they will be documented, photographed and restored. These artefacts, some of which have been in storage since the days of the museum's first director, Gustave Maspero, will be classified according to the latest inventory process and will either be returned to the museum or exhibited at the two major new museums currently being planned for Cairo, the Grand Egyptian Museum near the Giza Plateau, and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation. Other objects will be placed in the 30 storehouses recently built at various archaeological sites. The second phase -- involving the complete rehabilitation and restoration of the basement -- will begin immediately after the first phase is done, and will take two years to complete. The area will be transformed into an electronic storehouse similar to the British Museum's in London. In addition to the consolidation of its walls, including the treatment of cracks, computerised stainless steel store cabinets will be installed. Each will include a number of shelves to place, number and catalogue the objects properly. These cabinets come with an electronic device that automatically controls and supervises the access of the curator-in-charge upon the insertion of his/ her identification card. To tighten security, Hawass suggested that the guardianship of the artefacts should be distributed among several curators and not placed upon the shoulders of just one person. Internal security should be placed in the hands of the curators, Hawass said, with the police in charge of the areas surrounding the building. Hawass said that to upgrade the museum's management system, a comprehensive training course would be provided to all curators. Mahmoud Mabrouk, head of the SCA's museum department, said that in order to protect and preserve Egypt's history, a new inventory of the contents of the 700 storehouses built more than a century ago at many of the country's archaeological sites was being drawn up. He said some of the stored items would be transferred after documentation to the newly built and up-to- date storehouses. Mabrouk said these storehouses were replacing the old and dilapidated mud brick storehouses, which were vulnerable to robbers, who easily entered them and stole what they could. "We are not afraid of the results," said Culture Minister Farouk Hosni. "We have a problem that we must face in order to prevent any further mistakes, misplacements or disappearances."
