CAIRO: A grand parade conveyed 22 historical Egyptian royal mummies in particular capsules throughout the capital Cairo on Saturday to a brand new museum dwelling the place they are often displayed in larger splendour.
The convoy transported 18 kings and 4 queens, largely from the New Kingdom, from the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo’s Tahrir Square to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat, about 5km (3 miles) to the south-east.
Authorities shut down roads alongside the Nile for the flowery ceremony, designed to drum up curiosity in Egypt’s wealthy collections of antiquities when tourism has nearly completely stalled due to COVID-19 associated restrictions.
As the royal mummies arrived on the museum, which was formally inaugurated on Saturday, cannons fired a 21-gun salute. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stood by because the mummies filed previous on automobiles bedecked with golden pharaonic motifs.
The heads of the U.N. cultural company UNESCO and the World Tourism Organization had been additionally current on the ceremony.
Each mummy had been positioned in a particular capsule crammed with nitrogen to make sure safety, Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass mentioned.
They had been carried on automobiles designed to cradle them and supply stability.
‘CIVILISED’ DISPLAY
“We chose the Civilization Museum because we want, for the first time, to display the mummies in a civilized manner, an educated manner, and not for amusement as they were in the Egyptian Museum,” Hawass mentioned.
Archaeologists found the mummies in two batches on the advanced of mortuary temples of Deir Al Bahari in Luxor and on the close by Valley of the Kings from 1871.
The oldest is that of Seqenenre Tao, the final king of the seventeenth Dynasty, who reigned within the sixteenth century BC and is believed to have met a violent dying.
The parade additionally included the mummies of Ramses II, Seti I, and Ahmose-Nefertari.
Fustat, the house of the brand new museum, was the positioning of Egypt’s capital underneath the Umayyad dynasty after the Arab conquest.
“By doing it like this, with great pomp and circumstance, the mummies are getting their due,” mentioned Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist on the American University in Cairo.
“These are the kings of Egypt, these are the pharaohs. And so, it is a way of showing respect.”
(Additional reporting by Sayed Shaesha and Mahmoud Mourad; Writing by Nadeen Ebrahim and Aidan Lewis; Editing by Barbara Lewis and Gareth Jones)
