Archaeological exhibition in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo
Hungarian Excavations in the Theban Necropolis. A Celebration of 102 Years of Fieldwork in Egypt
MúzeumCafé 15.
The Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which holds the greatest collection of antiquities from the ancient Nile Valley, celebrated the centenary of its foundation in 2002. Although the permanent exhibition, which contains thousands of objects and represents the ideas of its first director, Gaston Maspero, did not undergo any change, the anniversary was commemorated with a temporary exhibition compiled from items in the museum’s own storeroom. The celebratory display, initiated by the newly appointed general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, was popular among visitors as well as in circles of professionals and specialists. Plans revealing that the Egyptian government was intending to construct two new museums in Cairo – one in Old Cairo (National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation) and one (Grand Egyptian Museum) near the pyramids of Giza – became public more or less at the same time as the exhibition in 2002. The success of the exhibition not only justified the plans but also clearly indicated that there existed a demand for thematic temporary exhibitions in the Egyptian Museum. The majority of exhibitions held since 2002 have been part of a series aiming to show the activity and latest achievements of foreign archaeological missions working in Egypt. The series began with American, French, German and Italian exhibitions, followed by displays illustrating the fieldwork of Polish, Australian, Czech, Spanish and Japanese Egyptologists. The Hungarian exhibition, financed by the Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture in cooperation with the Balassi Institute, is part of the series. The first Hungarian expedition began work on the Sharuna site in central Egypt on New Year’s Day in 1907. It was financed by a Hungarian businessman living in Cairo, Fülöp Back, who appointed Tadeusz Smolenski, a young Polish archaeologist, to lead the excavations. Back, who was a close acquaintance of Gaston Maspero, the then highly esteemed director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, made it abundantly clear in his correspondence that with starting the excavation work he intended Hungary, as part of the Monarchy, to join in the fieldwork in Egypt and as a result for Egyptian antiquities to get to Budapest, where they would be able to form the basis of an Egyptian collection to be founded in the National Museum. Two of the Monarchy’s successor states set up institutes in Cairo much later: in 1958 the Czech (then Czechoslovak) Institute of Archaeology and in 1966 the Austrian Institute of Archaeology were founded. Although Back’s plans with respect to an institute also serving Hungarian science ended in failure, the excavations in Sharuna and nearby Gamhud bear great significance for Hungarian science, since in the end a large part of the findings found their way to Hungary. Today the most important works are exhibited in the Collection of Egyptian Art in the Museum of Fine Arts. Hungary again participated in fieldwork in Egypt in 1964. Within the Nubia Rescue Campaign (necessitated by construction of the Aswan High Dam) an expedition of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences headed by László Castiglione excavated and documented the necropolis of Abdallah Nirqi, a late antique settlement near the Sudanese border. The conditions for a lasting Hungarian archaeological presence were made by 1983 when László Kákosy, Head of the Egyptology Department at Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University, got the concession to excavate the enormous rock tomb of Djehutymes in Thebes. The tomb, dating from the 13th century B.C., consists of three large courtyards, fifteen halls cut from rock and a mud-brick pyramid. The concession site significantly expanded in the 1990s and in 1995 excavations began in the nearby rock tomb of mayor Nefermenu, as well as at the monument of Imiseba, the last known tomb of the New Kingdom. Eötvös Loránd University’s Theben tomb project received the concession to excavate the burial sites of Bakenamun in 1996, of Amenhotep in 1999 and the tomb of Hamenu in 2007. Today three archaeological expeditions headed by Tamás Bács, Zoltán Fábián and Gábor Schreiber are working on the site. The teams are exploring more than twenty rock tombs in two topographically well defined areas of the Theban necropolis – el-Khokha and Sheikh Abd el-Gurna hills. Besides the Theben excavations several Hungarian expeditions have recently joined Egyptian fieldwork. Ulrich Luft has explored a settlement in the Eastern Desert, Gábor Lassányi took part in the rescue excavation necessitated by the Merowe Dam in Sudan and Zoltán Horváth, museologist of the Museum of Fine Arts, began the systematic study of the area in the vicinity of the pyramid of Sesostris II at El-Lahun in 2008. In addition, Zsuzsanna Vanek is excavating at Kom Truga.