The Grand Egyptian Museum

In January 2002, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture ran a competition for an innovative design for a new Grand Museum of Egypt. This two-volume publication contains sketches, plans, elevations and computer models of the prize-winning design and all other second-phase entries.

The Egyptian Museum houses the world's greatest collection of Egyptian treasures and antiquities, tens of thousands of stunning and fascinating objects dating from the earliest Predynastic times right through to the Greek and Roman Periods. Visitors to this great storehouse may become easily overwhelmed by the vast number of objects on display. But here for the first time is the world's best-known Egyptologist's personal introduction to the unmissable highlights of the Museum--Zahi Hawass's own selection of his favorite 200 exhibits. For each piece, he gives some background to its discovery and significance, and describes what it means for him in terms of the art or the history of ancient Egypt, and why it strikes a personal chord. "Due to my love of the Egyptian Museum, I thought that it would be wonderful to write a guide to its treasures, and to talk about my favorite objects within."--Zahi Hawass

A documentation, using latest technologies, of the late anthropoid sarcophagi housed in Cairo's Grand Egyptian Museum This joint publication project of Cairo University and the University of T bingen scholars uses modern technologies, including electronic drawing boards, photo merging, and 3-D modeling, to catalogue the late anthropoid sarcophagi housed in Cairo's Grand Egyptian Museum. Most of this collection was previously known only from the entries in M.-L. Buhl's The Late Egyptian Anthropoid Stone Sarcophagi (Copenhagen, 1959). This catalogue draws on the efforts of eight team members, each chapter prepared by a joint Egyptian-German team, with the drawings made by the Egyptians and the translations provided by the Germans. The Egyptian Museum photographer Ahmed Amin provided the teams with hundreds of photographs, which were later merged together with the help of Adobe Photoshop. The hieroglyphic texts were composed by JSesh. This, the first catalogue of the Grand Egyptian Museum, was made possible through financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

How can the unique legacy of the most ancient of civilizations be represented within a single building? How can one building spans the area between heaven and earth, the space described in the cosmology of our pharonic ancestors? Certainly, to design such a building is a unique challenge, and an unprecedented opportunity, on this most privileged of sites in the history of mankind, that a museum is to be constructed capable of linking the immemorial past with the distant future spanning both the horizons of the ancients and those as yet unseen. Through the investigation of phenomenology, geometry, simplicity, purity and light, listening to the voice of silence, emerging to the light from the darkness, and by understanding the strength of simplicity after passing through complexity, This thesis offers an endless stream of ideas that challenge the mind. The vision for the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) is to establish a place where people from different nations and cultures will be able to immerse themselves in the rich culture heritage from more than 5.000 years of Egyptian civilization. With the support of new technology, more effective and efficient dissemination of information can be achieved, enabling the New Museum to be a source of enjoyable, entertaining, educational and cultural experiences for all visitors.

"The Egyptian Old Kingdom (c. 2650-2150 BC) was an era of extraordinary artistic achievement-the period that gave us the Sphinx and the pyramids as well as a rich legacy of private tombs, wall paintings, reliefs, statuary, jewelry, and decorative arts. This book, the companion volume to a major traveling exhibition organized by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre in Paris, showcases the most impressive assemblage of Egyptian art and artifacts since the Tutankhamun exhibition of the late 1970s. Scholarly essays and 650 illustrations bring to life a remarkable panoply of Old Kingdom objects-temple and tomb reliefs, striking gold jewelry, handsome stone vessels, monumental statues, stelae, and exquisite statuettes. Together, text and images create a stunning tribute to the world of the Pharaohs"--Publisher's description.

The dramatic story behind the 3,200-year-old colossal Grand Egyptian Museum Ramesses statue King Ramesses II ruled Egypt for an extraordinary sixty-six years (1279–1213 BC) during the Nineteenth Dynasty. A great warrior and lavish builder, he fathered dozens of children and is widely regarded as the most celebrated and powerful pharaoh of the New Kingdom. This wonderfully clear, engaging book recounts the dramatic history of the famed red granite colossal statue of Ramesses II now residing in Egypt’s Grand Egyptian Museum. One of the biggest statues ever made and part of the urban landscape of modern Cairo, the statue lent its name to Ramses Square and the city's mainline train station, and was so much a symbol of Cairo that it featured in countless Egyptian films. Susanna Thomas recounts the full history of the statue’s creation and installation in the Great Temple of Ptah at Memphis during the reign of Ramesses II, its reuse by Ramesses IV, and the later history of the statue during the Greco-Roman and Islamic Periods. The book also provides an overview of how statues were made in ancient Egypt and includes a brief discussion of the statue cults of Ramesses II, kingship, temples, and the expansion of the New Kingdom capital city of Memphis and its temples. The final section covers the history of the statue since its rediscovery and subsequent rescue in the mid-nineteenth century until its installation in the entrance hall of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. Written by a New Kingdom specialist and curatorial expert and illustrated with over 150 images, Ramesses, Beloved by Ptah tells the fascinating story of this magnificent statue within the wider context of statue cults and the reign of Ramesses II, and its subsequent rescue and restoration in modern times.

This book presents the latest archaeological evidence that makes a case for Egypt as an early urban society. It traces the emergence of urban features during the Predynastic Period up to the disintegration of the powerful Middle Kingdom state (ca. 3500-1650 BC).