My Day at the Egyptian Museum, in Cairo :)

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Humbling stuff, the embarrassment of riches, that is on display in our museum. O, what those Ancients knew... They knew that in Beauty there is Divinity ... I miss our ancient wisdom.

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Walking in awe past the well-preserved mummies, I thought: those crafty pharaohs! They got their wish and achieved life after death...

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Thousands of years later, and we're still visiting with them and marveling. I think of a sentence from the play Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare, that might apply to Egypt.

Speaking of the Egyptian Queen, Mark Antony's friend says of Cleopatra:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety.

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Here is the Pharaoh Akhenaton who, while not the first monotheist as some claim, changed the prevailing religion (much to the ire of others) by declaring exclusive worship of the sun god Aton.

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I found these Fayoum portraits pretty striking--naturalistic paintedings on wooden boards, made during the lives of upper class individuals, and placed on their mummies so that their spirits would know where to return...

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Such an elaborate cosmology and conception of the afterlife, where hearts are weighed on a scale against a feather and prized possessions are buried with the dead in the hopes that they might be recovered in the next life.

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The art in the burial chambers is truly stunning, such vivid colors and so much dazzling gold...

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Of course, this is not for the faint of heart. Despite the prohibition to take pictures, my wife and I managed to slyly capture this photograph (I hope we did not incur the wrath of the mummies and their infamous curse...)

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