Museo Egizio (Egypt Museum)

It is considered one of the main Egypt museums in the world, with those in Cairo and in London: its peculiarity is the presence of artistic objects and of daily materials and tools.
Ever since the 18th century the Savoy had got a collection of Egypt antiques, and later there was an addiction of finds and statues taken by Vitaliano Donati, sent in Egypt by Carlo Emanuele III.

Entrance of the Egyptian Museum and the Savoy Gallery

In 1824 Carlo Felice bought the collection of Bernardo Drovetti, consul general of France in Egypt and, giving the actual seat, he created the first Egypt museum in the world.
There were important acquisitions under the direction of Ernesto Schiaparelli and Giulio Farina, who led excavating campaigns from 1903 until 1920 and from 1930 until 1937.

The visit starts in the ground floor from the statuary rooms, where there is the exhibition of two sphinxes with the face of Amehotep II, Ramses II in black basanite, Sethi II, of the princess Redi, the group of the king Tutankhamon III and of the god Amenca, the statue of Thutmose III and great stone sarcophaguses.
In the next room the rocky little temple of Ellesija (c. 1450 b.C.) was reconstructed; it was donated to the museum for the works done by the Italian archaeologists during the rescue of the monuments of Nubia, threatened by the Assuan dam.

In the underground floor of the Schiaparelli wing the excavating finds coming from Gebelein and Qau-el-Kabir can be seen.

In the first floor, in the first room, funerary stones and tombstones are exhibited. In the second room the funerary customs are documented: mummies, sarcophaguses, canopy, little statues, amulets and "Deads' Books".
In the third room there are handmade articles from the Palaeolithic age to the Coptic one; in this hall there are three little rooms.
In the first one there is an unknown tomb (2400 b.C.) found intact in Gebelein, in the second one there is the funerary chapel of the painter Meie (1300 b. C.); in the third one the tomb of the architect Kha and of his wife Mirit (1400 b.C.) was reconstructed; it was found in Dair-el-Medina with the intact furnishing.
In the fourth room there are the famous Isiac table and some weaving tools.
In the fifth room there is the exhibition of a few of the great number of the papyrus owned by the museum; in those that are exhibited, there is the royal Canon, the judicial papyrus, a topographical map, the ironic papyrus and the so-called "Ostrakon" of the dancer.
The sixth room is dedicated to arts and crafts, the seventh one to religion, with sacred animal mummies, the eighth one to paint with tempera pulled away from the tomb of Iti in Gebelein.