The Egyptian Museum is one of the largest and most famous international museums, located in the heart of the Egyptian capital "Cairo" on the northern side of Tahrir Square. Its establishment dates back to 1835 and was located at the time in Azbakeya Park, where it included a large number of various antiquities, and then transferred its contents to the second exhibition hall in the Citadel of Salah al-Din, until the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, who was working at the Louvre Museum, thought of opening a museum in which he displays a collection Of the antiquities on the Nile shore at Bulaq, and when these antiquities were exposed to the danger of flooding, they were transferred to a special annex at Khedive Ismail’s palace in Giza. Then came the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero and opened in 1902 during the reign of Khedive Abbas Helmy II the building of the new museum in its current location in the heart of Cairo. The Egyptian Museum is considered one of the first museums in the world that was established to be a public museum, unlike the museums that preceded it. The museum includes more than 180,000 artifacts, the most important of which are the archaeological collections found in the tombs of kings and the royal entourage of the middle family in Dahshur in 1894, and the museum now houses the largest collection Archaeological sites in the world express all phases of ancient Egyptian history.
The story of the museum began when foreign consuls accredited in Egypt expressed their admiration for ancient Egyptian art, and worked to collect Egyptian antiquities, and send them to the main European cities, and thus the Egyptian antiquities trade began to flourish, which later became a European fashion. Gifts from such rare pieces were common during the nineteenth century among the aristocracy, and coffins were among the most sought after. At first, the Egyptians did not understand the motives that made the Europeans care about the stones in their lands. While the most important motive behind the Egyptians excavating antiquities in temples and tombs were rumors that were circulating that some of these areas had hidden treasures.
The rule of Egypt at that time was Muhammad Ali Pasha, who began a new strategy, the basis of which was to open Egypt to the Western world. In 1835, Muhammad Ali Pasha issued a decree establishing the Egyptian Museum and Antiquities Department and assigned the administration of that department to Youssef Zia Effendi, under the supervision of Sheikh Refa'a al-Tahtawi, to take over the task of caring for the antiquities of the past. He succeeded in warning public opinion about the value of antiquities and ordered the issuance of a decree on August 15, 1835 to prevent smuggling and trafficking in Egyptian antiquities, but rather the necessity of their maintenance and preservation. The Egyptian Museum at that time was overlooking the banks of the Azbakeya pool, and then it was attached to the Al-Alsun School.
Youssef Zia Effendi, the director of the Antiquities Department, began inspecting the antiquities of Middle Egypt that were found by farmers. In 1848, Muhammad Ali Pasha commissioned Linan Bey, the Minister of Education, to draw up a comprehensive statement on the archaeological areas and to send important antiquities to the Egyptian Museum. And the collection that was housed in the museum that was held in Azbakeya began to shrink until it was transferred to Salah El-Din Castle in one hall. To make matters worse, Khedive Abbas I gifted the entire contents of that hall to Duke Maximilian of Austria during his visit to the castle.
Egyptian antiquities continued to be looted and destroyed until Khedive Abbas issued orders to the directorates to impose strict control on foreigners and Egyptians who were stealing, hiding and selling antiquities. Until Auguste Mariette came, who discovered the entrance to the Serapeum in Saqqara, and made excavations in the cemetery of the Apis calf, which lasted for nearly three years, and who sought to persuade the authorities to establish an Egyptian antiquities department and an Egyptian museum. On June 19, 1858, Khedive Said agreed to establish an Egyptian Antiquities Department, and appointed him commissioner of antiquities work in Egypt and the management of excavations. Mariette began to work intensive programs for archaeological research, and established a warehouse for antiquities on the banks of the Nile in Bulaq, which was turned into a museum on February 5, 1859 when the treasure of Queen Iahhotep was discovered in the Draa Abu al-Naga area in Thebes. And the weapons, which were of a high degree of splendor, incited Khedive Said to enthusiasm for the establishment of a museum of Egyptian antiquities in Bulaq. It was built during the reign of Khedive Ismail and was opened for a visit for the first time in 1863. In its infancy, the museum was a huge building overlooking the Nile and was called (House of Antiquities or Antikhana), but it was exposed to the Nile flood in 1878, and the water flooded the museum halls to the extent that a group of exhibits with Scientific artistic value has been lost
Mariette considered the Bulaq Museum a temporary location, and after the flood incident, he found an opportunity to demand the establishment of a permanent headquarters for the museum with a large capacity to accommodate a larger group of antiquities and at the same time be far from the path of the flood. After Mariette's death, he was succeeded by Gaston Maspero, who tried to move the museum from its location in Bulaq, but was unsuccessful. In 1889, the situation in the building containing the collections of antiquities reached its peak of overcrowding, as there were no longer enough rooms, whether in the exhibition halls or warehouses, for more antiquities. The antiquities found during excavations were left on boats in Upper Egypt for long periods. This tragic situation led to Khedive Ismail ceding one of his palaces in Giza, in the place where the zoo is now located, to be the new headquarters of the museum. And between the summer and the end of 1889, all the antiquities were transferred from the Bulaq Museum to Giza, and the artifacts were re-arranged in the new museum by the scientist de Morgan in his capacity as head of the museum. In the period from 1897 - 1899, Loret came as Morgan's successor, but Maspero returned again to run the museum from 1899 - 1914.
The French architect Marcel Dornon designed the Museum in 1897 to be held in the northern area of Tahrir Square (formerly Ismailia), along the British army barracks in Cairo at Qasr al-Nil. His ministry, and the project was completed by German Hermann Grabo. In November 1903, the Antiquities Authority appointed the Italian architect Alessandro Parazzanti, who received the keys to the museum since March 9, 1902, and transferred the archaeological collections from Khedive Ismail’s palace in Giza to the new museum, a process during which five thousand wooden carts were used, and the huge monuments were transported on two trains. Back and forth about nineteen times between Giza and Qasr al-Nil. The first shipment carried about forty-eight stone sarcophagi, weighing more than a thousand tons in total. However, the transfer process has been marred by chaos for some time. The transfers were completed on July 13, 1902, and Mariette's tomb was moved to the museum's garden, in fulfillment of his will in which he expressed his wish that his body should be housed in the museum's garden with the relics he spent a long time collecting during his life. On November 15, the Egyptian Museum was officially opened. The new museum relied on a display method based on gradual arrangement of the halls and did not take into account the allocation of rooms for periods of turbulence, as they were considered to be of no historical importance. The museum’s antiquities were classified according to their themes, but for architectural reasons, the huge statues were placed on the ground floor, while the funerary crypts discovered on the first floor were displayed according to the historical sequence, and every day antiquities were placed and assembled in a number of rooms according to their themes. And it became the only museum in the world so crowded with antiquities that it became a storehouse, and when Maspero was asked about the reason, he replied that the Egyptian Museum is a picture of the tomb or the pharaonic temple, as the artist used every part of it to put a painted painting or hieroglyphic inscriptions, and even the modern Egyptian house in that The time was when paintings and pictures were placed so that every part was exploited on the wall, meaning that the museum was a picture of the current and ancient Egyptian
Seventy-three design projects competed for the construction of the museum building, and in the end, the design of the French architect Marcel Dornon, who designed a creative work, was chosen to be the first museum in the world that was built to be a museum and not a modified building into a museum. That period. The architectural styles and elements in the museum were influenced by classical Greek art and architecture, and it did not contain any influences of ancient Egyptian art and ancient Egyptian temples except in the design of its rooms or in the design of its interior halls, where the entrance to the halls mimics the edifices of ancient Egyptian temples.