Cairo (AFP)
Chariots carrying 22 mummies of kings and queens of ancient Egypt will form an unprecedented procession on Saturday, during a "parade of the pharaohs", between the Cairo museum, where they have rested for over a century, and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC).
The mummies will be on display at NMEC, a huge modern building built in recent years in southern Cairo, which is due to open in mid-April.
From 6:00 p.m. (4:00 p.m. GMT) on Saturday, 22 royal mummies, including 18 kings and four queens, will be transported there in chronological order, each aboard a chariot decorated in the Pharaonic style and bearing the name of the sovereign.
The journey, which will last around 40 minutes, will be placed under close police surveillance.
Pharaoh Seqenenre Taa (16th century BC) of the 17th dynasty will lead the way, which will be closed by Ramses IX (12th century BC) of the 20th dynasty.
Better known to the general public, Ramses II and Hatshepsout will also be part of the "golden parade of the pharaohs".
- Enhancements -
The event will be accompanied by musical performances broadcast live on Egyptian television.
Discovered near Luxor (south) from 1881, most of the 22 mummies have not left the Egyptian Museum, located in Tahrir Square in central Cairo, since the beginning of the 20th century.
Since the 1950s, they were exhibited next to each other in a small room, without clear museographic explanations.
For transport on Saturday, they will be placed in an envelope containing nitrogen, under conditions similar to those of their exhibition boxes.
And the tanks carrying them will be equipped with shock absorption mechanisms.
At the NMEC, they will appear in more modern boxes "for better temperature and humidity control than in the old museum", explains to AFP Salima Ikram, professor of Egyptology at the American University of Cairo, specialist of mummification.
They will be presented individually alongside their sarcophagi, in a setting reminiscent of the underground tombs of kings, and will be accompanied by a biography.
The scanners carried out on some of them will be exhibited.
"The mummies will be presented for the first time in a beautiful way, for educational purposes. Not for sensationalism," Egyptian Egyptologist Zahi Hawass told AFP.
According to him, the macabre nature of the mummies has in the past put off more than one visitor.
"I will never forget when I took (Princess) Margaret, sister of Queen Elizabeth II, to the museum: she closed her eyes and ran away," he says.
After years of instability following the popular revolt of 2011, which dealt a heavy blow to tourism, Egypt is seeking to bring back visitors by promoting the NMEC or the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) near pyramids of Giza, which is due to be inaugurated in the coming months.
- "The curse of the pharaohs" -
The GEM, a huge project, will house Pharaonic collections from the Cairo Museum, including the famous treasure of King Tutankhamun.
Discovered in 1922, the tomb of Tutankhamun (14th century BC), concealed the mummy of the young king and numerous objects of gold, alabaster or ivory.
Why not exhibit the mummies at the GEM instead?
“GEM has King Tutankhamun, the star. If you don't put mummies in NMEC, no one is going to go,” Mr Hawass replies.
While waiting for Saturday evening, the large parade, which the authorities have publicized with videos online, caused a sensation on social networks.
Under the hashtag in Arabic # malédiction_des_pharaons, many Internet users have associated the recent disasters in Egypt with a "curse" which would have been caused by the displacement of the pharaohs.
In one week, Egypt saw the blockade of the Suez Canal by a container ship, a train accident that left 18 dead in Sohag (south) and the death of at least 25 people in the collapse of a building in Cairo.
The "curse of the pharaoh" had been mentioned by the press in the 1920s after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, because members of the archaeological team were said to have died under mysterious circumstances.
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