Luxor Museum

Of the ten institutions on our roster, the Luxor Museum is the one most likely to be overlooked by the first-time traveller, and the one most warmly recommended by every Egyptologist we know. It is small — a single building of two storeys on the east-bank Corniche, approximately halfway between Luxor Temple and the medieval Suq al-Khayyamiya. It was opened in 1975, an unheralded year in Egyptian cultural history, with a brief to display a carefully selected group of objects from Upper Egypt in the uncluttered style pioneered by the American Metropolitan Museum — white walls, considered light, one or two objects per room. Half a century later the approach has aged superbly. The museum is, in our quiet opinion, the most rewarding two-hour visit on the Nile.

I. The Luxor cachette

The museum's central treasure is the cache of twenty-two royal statues discovered in February 1989 beneath the sun court of Luxor Temple, a few hundred metres south of the present building. A team of Egyptian archaeologists conducting routine drainage work had found the first stone; within six weeks they had exposed a careful pharaonic burial of the temple's own statuary, concealed by priests during a period of political instability in the late New Kingdom. Among the cache is a superbly preserved black-granite statue of Amenhotep III — the so-called "most beautiful face in Egyptian sculpture" — its polished surface almost untouched by time. The statue now stands alone in a dedicated room of the Luxor Museum, on a low plinth, with its own light. It is worth the flight to Upper Egypt on its own.

II. The Tutankhamun mummification exhibit

A smaller, discreet upper gallery addresses the practice of royal mummification, using a set of tools and linen bandages recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamun's embalming cache. The objects are humble — linen pads, natron salts, small ceramic jars, the resin-soaked wrappings of the embalmers themselves — and the display deliberately quiet, with no elaborate graphics. The effect is to turn the ritual of mummification into an act of ordinary, attentive craft, which is what it was. Children, in our experience, are more transfixed by this gallery than by anything else in the building.

III. The Akhenaten wall

A long corner of the ground floor is given to a reconstructed wall of inscribed sandstone blocks — the "talatat" — salvaged from the demolished Ninth Pylon at Karnak, where the earlier pharaoh Akhenaten had built a temple to the Aten before his reign was repudiated and its monuments dismantled. The blocks depict scenes of royal life at the new capital at Amarna: the king and queen offering to the sun disc, daughters playing in the palace garden, musicians and courtiers in informal procession. The informality of the Amarna style — its unprecedented softness and daily detail — is caught here with extraordinary warmth.

IV. The evening opening

Luxor Museum has for many years operated a split timetable: morning and then evening opening, with a break during the hottest hours of the afternoon. The evening hours — from five until ten — are the most rewarding for the pass-holder. The galleries are cooler. The light in the Amenhotep room has, in this final hour, a quality of ochre that the designer clearly intended. The Nile is fifty metres away and the corniche cafés are serving the first of the evening's tea. A visit to Luxor Museum in the late afternoon, followed by dinner on a shaded terrace watching the feluccas come home, is among the classic evenings of Egypt.

V. A note on scale

The entire collection numbers around three hundred objects. The brevity is deliberate; the museum's founding curators took the view that the traveller arriving in Luxor, already overwhelmed by Karnak and Luxor Temple, needed a small and well-paced gallery as a counterweight, not a second exhausting encyclopedia. Two hours suffices. Two hours are what the museum asks.

VI. Practical suggestion

Combine with a late-morning visit to Luxor Temple (a fifteen-minute walk south) and an evening felucca. The pass covers museum admission; the temple admission is itself covered on the Nile Heritage Pass and above. A pass-holder on a three-day Upper Egypt stay typically visits Karnak on the first morning, the Valley of the Kings on the second, and uses the third day for Luxor Temple in the morning and Luxor Museum in the evening, with the Nile between. It is a restful, considered rhythm.