Museum visits and networking in Cairo, Egypt, March 2023

March 2023 turned out to be busy with networking in Cairo. Following a string of preliminary discussions about the project with our Egyptian colleagues, Iwona and Magda travelled to Cairo for a series of museum visits and meetings with curators, lab specialists and representatives from the Research and Conservation Centre of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in Egypt.

Guided by the museum curators, we re-acquainted ourselves with the wonderful collections of ancient Egyptian artefacts, textiles, and mummified remains currently held at the Egyptian Museum (Tahrir Square) and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (NMEC). It was our pleasure to meet the new director of the Egyptian Museum, Dr Ali Abdel Halim, and spent time with a team of dedicated and forward-looking museum curators.

A warm welcome was extended to us at the NMEC, where we attended a symposium on aDNA studies currently conducted in Egypt. It was a great opportunity to discuss current state of research in bioarchaeology and opportunities for knowledge exchange with the NMEC team of specialists and curators.

After museum visits, we headed to Saqqara where we conducted a visual study of funerary chapels and tombs with the focus on pictorial representations of ancient Egyptian life and environment during the Old and New Kingdoms.

The culmination of our visit to Egypt was a trip to Wadi al-Hitan (Valley of the Whales), a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Wadi el-Rayan Protected Area, south of the Fayoum Oasis. The site is one of the most important in the world to demonstrate the changes in life on Earth and its environment. The Fossils and Climate Change Museum at Wadi al-Hitan offers a window into the world long gone, and prompts visitors to reflect on the consequences of climate change, past and present. To walk across the bed of an archaic ocean was truly an unforgettable experience.