Museum Egipcio of Turín

The Egyptian Museum in Turin, founded in 1824, is the oldest Egyptian museum in the world, and second by importance, second only to the Cairo. Dedicated exclusively to the art and culture of ancient Egypt, its collection has been interest from the most important scholars of the past as Jean-François Champollion. For this and the importance of the collections present in the museum, Turin is considered the city where he was born Egyptology.

The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, your full name, is presented as a set of collections result of acquisitions made over four centuries and findings in the excavations of the Italian Archaeological Mission between 1900 and 1935, which brought Italy a substantial part thereof, as used to be common at the time.

Due to the enormous interest aroused by collecting Egyptian antiquities in 1824 King Charles Felix of Sardinia, joining the collection of a Paduan Egyptologist, Vitaliano Donati and the ancient remains of the Savoy family, she gave birth to the museum, the first in the world. A few years earlier, after the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt, it was Drovetti Bernardino, Piedmont and Consul General of France during the occupation of Egypt, which collected over 8,000 items: sarcophagi, mummies, papyri, obelisks and statues. The first museum director Ernesto Schiaparelli, prompted new acquisitions and, after further excavation campaigns in Egypt led by him, the collection eventually grew to 30,000 current artistic and domestic and everyday pieces.

Today the museum is in a phase of expansion and their works will be relocated to the beautiful rooms of the palace. If you are of great importance mummies and representations of sacred animals linked to the worship of the gods, ornaments and utensils of work that have come to us they have allowed to reconstruct with precision the daily lives of these people and their pharaohs during the ancient Egypt, to the point that Jean-François Champollion, the translator of the Rosetta Stone, said: "the road to Memphis and Thebes passes through Turin."

Among the most important remains are intact tomb of Kha and Merit and rock Ellesija Temple, however, from the historical point of view, the most important perhaps is the Canon Real, known as Royal Turin Papyrus, one of the most important sources on the succession of Egyptian rulers in which is listed in hieratic script, the successor, age and years of reign. Also impressive are the statues of the goddesses Isis and Sekhmet and that of Ramses II discovered by Vitaliano Donati in the temple of the goddess Mut at Karnak.