The rest of the world has been going crazy for Egypt since circa 12BC when a Roman praetor named Caius Cestius chose to be buried in a marble-veneer pyramid just outside Rome's Ostian Gate.
More than a million people have now seen the Tutankhamun exhibition at the O2 Centre, a popular success that, although it has made fewer headlines, matches Tut's first extravaganza in the 1970s, which packed out the British Museum for six months (tickets 50p) and criss-crossed America for three years. Its triumphant progress then (twice the number of people saw it at Seattle Art Museum as were living in Seattle at the time, for instance) earned the Egyptian Government a tidy sum by the standards of the day - $7million on the American leg alone - which was officially earmarked for a revamp of the display facilities at the treasures' permanent home, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Thirty years on, it's hard to think any of the money actually reached its destination. In fact it's hard to think of change of any sort disturbing the dusty, eternal dreams of the Egyptian Museum for large stretches of the last century. This incredible building offers many delights, not least the world's most magnificent collection of pharaonic art, but display facilities are not obviously one of them. Captions, wall panels, organisation by themes – all but none of the trappings of the modern museum corral the contents of its vast halls and atrium modelled on the interior of an Ancient Egyptian temple. Instead, its vast mother lode of splendours mutely await discovery, like Ancient Egypt itself, one of the best documented and, at the same time, most enigmatic civilisations in history.
All this may soon be about to change. A new museum, the Grand Egyptian Museum, is due at any moment to be built on a 100-acre site next to the Pyramids. Ground clearing has begun, the Japanese government has agreed a $300 million loan, the 36-feet-high statue of Rameses II has been moved into place - its 10-hour journey through Cairo's streets lined with thousands of onlookers was broadcast live on television. Plans for what will allegedly be the world's largest museum show a hi-tech modernist glass structure with a translucent alabaster façade and a network of "streets, piazzas and bridges" linking the mass of exhibition spaces that will house 100,000 artefacts. All in all, it promises to be another spectacular new dawn of which Cairo is so fond.
But sooner or later it too will be faced with the basic problem of Egyptology – the sheer profusion and variety of the material. Some 3,500 objects were found in Tutankhamun's tomb, of which 1,700 are on display in the Egyptian Museum and the rest are stored in its basement (no more than 60 have ever left the country).
And yet he was only a minor king who died before he could accumulate a substantial fortune. All the obvious royal tombs have been stripped by thieves. But even so, with a regularity that virtually beggars belief, the finds keep on coming (try putting "tombs discovered Egypt" into Google). In the last 20 years alone, the largest royal tomb complex has been discovered in the Valley of the Kings; a tourist's horse's stumble in the sands south of the Great Sphinx has revealed the mud-brick tombs of the labourers and overseers who built the Pyramids; the earliest examples of alphabetic writing have been found on cliffs in the desert west of the Nile; and thousands of mummies have been unearthed by an oasis in the so-called Valley of the Golden Mummies. These are only the highlights, and, in true Egyptian style, the royal tombs are in fact a rediscovery: the complex was discovered in 1825, a few of its rooms were mapped, and its entrance was then promptly lost.
The Ancient Egyptians were obsessed by life rather than death. They were determined in every way they knew how to prolong the sheer sweetness and sensuousness and physicality of being alive – alive as perhaps you could only be when living on the plentiful banks of Nile in the midst of what, originally at least, you thought to be unending desert. They wished their dead "bread, beer, and prosperity"; hard to think of anything further removed from the Judaeo-Christian tradition of an immortal self shedding its corporeal form, its "prison", at death. The body was a crucial part of their individual existence, hence the necessity of mummification, and their entire theology was designed not to justify death – for instance as God's revenge on us for our original sin – but to defeat it with the help of any one of their thousands of gods.
At first only the Pharaoh was thought to be able to enjoy the pleasures of this world in paradise, but as time passed, huge swathes of society became eligible. Everything, depending of course on whether it was war or peacetime, became more elaborate and manifold: mummification techniques, spells, rituals, blithely contradictory myths, offerings, temples, pyramids, jewellery, literature. And because they were such good craftsmen and the desert is so good at preserving things and their civilisation lasted so long, Egypt is both an archaeologist's dream and biggest challenge. Some simply give up. Around two million mummified ibis are thought to be stored in the catacombs of Saqqara, but no one is prepared to spend any more time working out exactly how many. But, even more pressing, once you do find something, what on earth are you supposed to do with it?
The first purpose-built museum in the world, the Egyptian Museum, with its neo-classical façade and reinforced concrete walls, was the height of up-to-date cosmopolitanism when it opened in 1902. Designed to house collections that had already outgrown four previous homes, the building filled up immediately, but then the fun really began. Tutankhamun's tomb, discovered in 1922, was the most spectacular find, but it was only the tip of the iceberg - the royal tombs at Tanis, for instance, produced wonderful gold face masks and silver coffins. Exhibits were shunted around, but most of the haul - around 80,000 artefacts - went straight into the basement. Exactly how much is impossible to tell since, after a series of embarrassing thefts at the turn of the millenium, Zahi Hawass, the general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, ventured down into the basement to discover an incredible hodgepodge of grime-encrusted, unopened packing cases, coffins and mummies piled on top of one another and human remains scattered over shelves.
"For the last 100 years, curators sat down to drink tea, but they did not do their jobs," the Indiana-Jones-hat-wearing Hawass exclaimed (he has a flair for the dramatic, as anyone who has seen the introductory film on his website zahihawass.com will know). "How many artifacts are in the basement? It was awful."
A full inventory, it turned out, hadn't been taken since the 1930s.
So until the new database commissioned is complete, a cloud of unknowing will continue to hang over the museum, like the hazy gloaming in which parts of it are sunk. The signage, such as it is, is a law unto itself: a percentage are in English or Arabic, some date from 1902, in rather impatient French, and some are too high to read. The building is arranged according to the accepted chronology of Egyptian history in the 19th century, which leaves sizeable gaps. And in room after room, you gaze at things thinking, what is that?
This makes for a unique, and in many ways, uniquely stimulating experience. Every big museum - the Louvre, the Met, the Uffizi - needs a plan after all, and you can buy a map for LE40 (£3.80) or a guidebook (Illustrated Guide to the Egyptian Museum, AUC Press, LE180/£17) at the entrance and work your way round the highlights. Tutankhamun's wonders at the far end of the first floor could be a museum in itself, with its incredible profusion of gold and precious jewels, and unending repetition – interlocking shrines and coffins like Russian dolls.
Fatigue, rather than any shortage of highlights, is the only potential problem, and that is when the other side of the museum kicks in: the ability to go off-piste and make wonderful discoveries. Priest's wigs, the first boomerangs, the first documented use of the colon, undeciphered Nubian scripts. Amazing contrasts between the monumental and the diminutive, absolute power and private affection, the idealised and the naturalistic.
Egypt has always promoted the long view, and looking at the same forms repeated over centuries, in different states of repair is like watching stop-frame renditions of the effects of time. Patience, artistry – it must be a wonderful place to sketch – and, above all, a delight in life in all its physical forms, the Egyptian Museum perfectly bears out Florence Nightingale's famous quote, "One wonders that people come back from Egypt and live lives as they did before."
· The Egyptian Museum (+ (02) 578 2448/52) is open daily, including weekends and holidays, from 9am–6.45pm. Egyptians pay EGP2 (19p) for admission; foreigners pay EGP50 (£4.75). Separate admission is charged to the Mummy Room: EGP10 (95p) for Egyptians and EGP00 (£9.50) for foreigners. Students and children pay half all quoted prices.
Getting there
KLM flies from Heathrow to Cairo from £276, Air France fly from Heathrow to Cairo from £283 and Alitalia fly from Heathrow to Cairo from £291.
Hotels
Medium priced: EGP 260-375 (£25-£36) double room
There's a host of art deco hotels downtown that do not stint on atmosphere although it's worth checking how comfortable the beds are before choosing a room. The Windsor Hotel is one of the most famous (19 Al-Alfi Street, Downtown; +202 591 5277; windsorcairo.com) and has a fantastic bar, but The Grand, with its varnished wooden floors, big tiled bathrooms and general tranquility seems to win over most people. (The Grand Hotel: 17 26 of July Street, Azbakeya; +202 575 7801/2/3/4/5; e-mail: grandhotel@link.net).
Budget: EGP 50 - 80 for a double room (£5-£8)
The Amin Hotel (38 Midan Falaki, Downtown; +202 393 3813) is a good option opposite the Bab el-Louk fruit and veg market on Falaki Square, a couple of doors down from El-Horreya. Best to choose rooms with en-suite bathrooms. For all-round 1940s cosiness and to feel like you're staying with the Italian granny you never knew you had, try Pensione Roma (169 Mohamed Farid Street; +202 391 1088/391 1340) but book ahead as it's very popular.
