The Basement of the Cairo Museum Featuring Dr Zahi Hawass

There are many interesting things we can learn from this basement. The story that I will tell you now is why, when I became the head of Antiquities, I decided to change this basement.

The story begins when I was a young man and I went to the site for excavations. And at that time I didn't want to be an archaeologist. I really hated to be an archaeologist. Everyday I had to sit in the tent hating every minute of staying at these excavations, at the site called Kom Abu Bellou. It was very important archaeological site. But in that time I didn't know.

We discovered temples, cemeteries, tombs. Every year I used to come and bring over sixty boxes in a truck. The director would take the boxes and put them in the basement. Years after my first excavations I asked every director of the Cairo Museum: “Where are the boxes of Kom Abu Bellou?” They never found them, they never knew anything about it. Until Sabah Abed el Razek came to the basement and she found these boxes.

This is something I touched more than 25 years ago. In the middle of the tomb this beautiful statue was found. I began to clean, to discover this statue of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love for the Greeks. She was also in the eyes of the Romans – Venus, the goddess of beauty and love. She was in the eyes of the ancient Egyptians – Hathor, the goddess of beauty and love. I had my brush, I began to clean, I found the face apart of the body. And this is when I said: “I found my love – archaeology.”

When we did the celebration of the centenary of the Cairo Museum, I took one part of the basement, and we cleaned it, and we made it as a permanent exhibit that we can show. It's lightened, it's beautifully done. And I said to myself after I opened it: “I'm going to make the basement like this.”