posted
6 April 2007 20:19 Home > News > World > Africa
Legacy of the Pharaohs: Welcome to the treasure dome
In the shadow of the pyramids, a new museum is being built that is set to transform the visitor's experience of the ancient wonders of Egypt.
Peter Popham reports from Giza Published: 06 April 2007
The modern world has not been kind to the pyramids of Giza. Just a generation ago they were out in the desert, which is how they still look in the postcards, shot from carefully selected angles. But rampant development has hemmed them in with the accoutrements of the tourist trade - cafes, restaurants, souvenir workshops, stables for horses and camels, tacky little establishments of every sort, and slummy accommodation into which tourist hawkers are crammed.
Then comes the Cairo ring road and the undistinguished modern hotels that line it; the road itself is solid with traffic. Forty-five centuries of history - that's how long the oldest of these pyramids has held sway here - look down on our contribution and are not, one suspects, greatly impressed. The visitor's experience of the place is a cocktail of wonder and torment: wonder - if you pick the right time of day, the closer to nightfall the better - at the ineffable presence of mankind's oldest monuments, torment at the antics of the touts, who if you are not incredibly vigilant will sell you a can of Sprite for a week's (Egyptian) wages, stick you on a horse, haul you off the horse and stick you in Arabian costume on a camel, take your snap, all of this without any consultation, as if it is somehow your duty - and leave you impressively poorer than when you arrived.
It's unforgettable, all right. But apart from the papyrus workshops and the like, the experience is strangely lacking in depth. What are the pyramids all about? Who built them and how and why, and what came next? You can ask your guide as you plod along on horse or camel, but don't expect much enlightenment.
All that is about to change. On a desert site within view of the pyramids, an immense museum, built by the Chinese-American architect Shih-Fu Peng, is about to rise which will transform the Giza experience. The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM)will be the biggest museum of Egyptology in the world, and (it is claimed) the largest archaeological museum of any sort. It is designed to become the modern complement the pyramids have always lacked.
It will rise at the point where the Nile's flood plain hits the sand plateau that marks the start of the Sahara desert. The first glimpse of it, through a grove of high palms, will be a vast wall running the entire length of the site composed entirely of triangular segments of onyx. "The face of the plateau is exactly aligned with the Great Pyramid of Chephren," says Yasser Mansour, the project director. "It is the line between fertile land and the desert, between life and death. So what kind of line should this be, how to represent its aesthetic qualities? The architect answered that it should be a timeless surface, and as light is timeless, it should be translucent."
Initially the architect wanted alabaster, the luminous pink stone that some believe once covered the pyramids. "But the quality and quantity of alabaster seemed very thin," says Mansour. He settled instead for semi-precious onyx: the contractors are now scouring the world's markets for a quantity sufficient to cover six football fields.
This stupendous facade, which Mansour describes as one of the museum's two "icons", along with the grand staircase, suggests that the design is offering competition for awesomeness to the pyramids. Mansour denies that flatly. "The highest point of the museum - the top of the facade - is actually the lowest point of the pyramids, which are built on the plateau. This way you don't compare the museum with the greatness of the pyramids: it's a humble statement."
"There's a 150ft difference in levels at the site," says Roisin Heneghan, Shih-Fu Peng's partner (and wife), "so we embedded the museum between them, creating a new cliff face. From inside the museum you can see all three pyramids ..."
Light, and geometry: these are the museum's key elements. As seen from the Cairo direction, the softly luminous surface of the onyx wall is meant to draw the visitor in, inviting him or her to enter and explore. In the evening - the museum is intended to stay open long after dark - the building will continue to glow.
Slicing through the onyx wall will be an enormous entrance courtyard which will be the new home of the vast statue of Rameses II, all 83 tons of it. Until last year it stood in front of Cairo's railway station. It was moved with immense care in the dead of night. "The transfer cost us nearly $1m," says Yasser Mansour. "The slightest shock could have shattered it into pieces. A committee of experts spent a year studying a way to move it, even though the distance it had to cover was only five kilometres.
"We decided to begin the move at midnight, when Cairo starts to empty out. But it was a wasted effort: a crowd followed the convoy on foot for the nine hours that it took, and the people were weeping as if they were following the corpse of their father to the cemetery."
The statue now stands in a corrugated iron enclosure in the museum grounds, awaiting its final move, in 2011 - when the museum is scheduled to open - to the new courtyard.
"Before we moved it from outside the railway station it was going to fall," adds Mohamed Ghoneim, the museum's general co-ordinator. "But we didn't know that at the time - we discovered that there was a spring underneath it which would have caused it to topple over if we had not moved it."
The rest of the 100,000 works destined for the museum will begin arriving next March. They will be greeted in the first part of the museum to be built, the underground Conservation and Energy Centre that is already under construction and due to be completed by the end of the year. Every item that arrives here, whether from the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo or from the many other sites around the country, will first be inspected and documented in the centre's nine laboratories.
"They will all be given a conservation analysis report," says Mohamed Ghoneim. "Some will just need a bit of first aid, others will require intensive restoration - though it will be conservative restoration as we don't intend to intrude on the object."
The museum's second great icon, beyond the Rameses statue, is an immense staircase, 600 metres long and climbing 45 metres, that hauls visitors (there will be escalators as well as steps) right up the "cliff face" that Roisin Heneghan speaks of.
The staircase leads to the different galleries that branch off it, and will itself function as part of the museum's exhibition space - in ways now being secretly developed by Metaphor, the London-based event space designers. At the top, visitors are greeted with a panoramic view of the pyramids. Ghoneim expects that five million visitors will come to the museum per year, rising to eight million by 2020. The great majority will be clamouring to see the great Egyptian treasures which will at last find a worthy home here. In particular, they will want to see the 4,000-odd items from Tutankhamun's tomb, and the solar boats in which the god Ra completed his daily journey across the sky.
But there will be more to the museum than ancient artefacts. This will be the museum of the history of ancient Egyptian civilisation. "We go up to the Greco-Roman period," says Ghoneim, "and then we stop."
And the word civilisation is interpreted in its fullest sense, to include the entire ancient culture of the Nile, from irrigation to agriculture and arts and crafts - which will be not merely exhibited but recreated in the museum's four roof-top parks, overlooking the pyramids, and taught, to schoolchildren and aspiring craftsmen, as practical skills.
"There will be workshops for arts and crafts," says Ghoneim, "teaching people who want to be professional craftsmen: teaching them ancient techniques of woodworking, sculpture, pottery, papyrus plant cultivation and manufacture, spinning and weaving in the ancient Egyptian way, and the cultivation of ancient flowers."
GEM will, in other words, be quite unlike anything presently available in Egypt - and about time too, many will say. The famous Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, in the centre of Cairo, was built in 1902 by a French architect, and was meant to hold 10,000 antiquities. Today there are 120,000 on display, tens of thousands more in store, and the whole experience is drastically out of date. Dingy galleries with salmon-pink walls and fluorescent lights high up near the ceiling echo to the shrieks of incessant school groups and are patrolled by guards in berets, toting machine guns.
The museum's great treasures are so beautiful and so important that they triumph over most of this mediocrity. But for anyone in search of knowledge it is a frustrating place. Some exhibits boast captions that are helpfully multilingual, while in other places they are completely absent. Some splendid little corners that have received private funds abut others where little has changed in years.
The Tahrir Square museum will have a new life after GEM opens, as a wholly new Museum of Pharaonic Arts, but no one doubts that GEM is where most tourists will want to head first.
"If you want to understand Egyptian civilisation, you will come here," says Ghoneim. "Here will be more comprehensive. This will not be just a museum per se. It will contain a museum, a special museum for children, areas for people with special needs who don't want to go round the whole museum, an 800-seat conference centre which will also be a theatre for performances inspired by ancient Egyptian civilisation; operas such as Aida and ballets. There will also be 500- and 250-seat auditoriums. There will be an Imax cinema and a specialised library and mediatech."
The museum will also be linked electronically with other important Egyptology museums around the world. The cost is estimated at $592m of which nearly $300m has been provided in soft loans by Japan.
Beyond the architectural and technological razzmataz, the museum marks an important turning point. The Pyramid Road that leads to the Giza pyramids was built for Napoleon's empress Eugénie; the present Egyptian Museum was also a colonial enterprise; at one point in its life, antiquities were auctioned in it. But now, with GEM, Egypt plans to take charge of its own patrimony.
"We are Egyptians," says Mohamed Ghoneim, "which means we are proud of ancient Egyptian civilisation. We are not fanatical Muslims here - a very few may be against the depiction of faces, but we don't care for those people. This is our history and civilisation. The museum will help us to educate our people to be modern, and at the same time to know their ancient history."
Of course, I doubt this new Museum will be as good as the original Cairo Museum. Who knows.
Posts: 26318 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic