12/16/2009
Before we visited the step pyramid, we stopped by Imhotep Museum. The first part of the museum we watched a short video explaining the area and a brief history of the Saqqara Desert which was helpful since we were going to see the step pyramid next. Then, we proceeded inside to the museum which was really nice and lit up and modern since it is one of the newer museums. The museum was broken up into five areas/rooms. The first room was the main entrance which was a room dedicated to the archeologist of the Saqqara Desert. I really like this room because I found out that the archeologist, Joan-Philippe Laver, was brought to excavate this area on an 8 month excavation contract in 1926. The thing that caught my eye was that he died working there in 2001, so he died at the age of 99 years-old, meaning he excavated that area for 75 YEARS which is incredible. Also, in the first area was Imhotep; many believe he was a great architect. The second area displayed all recent finding since the area is still under excavating everyday and new finding are happening all the time which is incredible. We all thought about what if we were one of the people to find anything there. The third area is dedicate to Imhotep’s architecture, and showed his work from the Step Pyramid. It was great to see things that were made thousands and thousands of years ago and that can’t even be rebuild by our engineers today. The fourth area was called the Saqqara style and showed vessels and statues in wood and stone which was neat because they took pieces of the wall where things were engraved and fixed them but brought them inside to be seen and preserved. Finally, the last area was the Saqqara tomb which displayed objects used in burials and building their structures. My favorite thing that caught my attention were the tools that they used because they didn’t have much and the things they did have were hard to imagine using them to make such detailed structures as they did. That is the Imhotep Museum and until next time…Salam.
Posted at 8:24 PM by Barry Matthes