Coptic Museum

The Coptic Museum in Cairo is located inside the ruins of the Roman Babylon Fort in Maser El Qadema in Coptic Cairo Center, an area which is full of Coptic Churches and chapels like the famous hanging Church and the Church of St Barbra.

the foundation of the Coptic Museum goes back to the era of the Persians and a lot of items were added afterwards by the Roman emperors August and Trajan. The famous French scientist Maspero played a major role in the establishment of the modern museum as he spent a long time collecting Coptic monuments from all around Egypt and preserving it.

The founder of the Museum in modern times is Smeka Pasha who requested that the items in the museum to be added to the Egyptian Committee for preserving antiquities and art. This man exerted huge efforts to found the building of the museum that is present right now and which was opened to the public in 1901 with Smeka as the first head of the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

The Coptic Museum today consists mainly of two major sections: the old section established by Smeka Pasha and the new the section that consists of two floors which was opened for the public in 2006 after a huge renovation and restoration period that its cost reached more than 30 million pounds because the museum was affected badly by the earth quake that struck Egypt in 1992. The museum now displays around 1600 items collected from various regions around Egypt and go back to different century in the Coptic history of Egypt and the Coptic Museum is considered to be a complete illustration of the Coptic history in Egypt.

Truly one of the most interesting Egypt Day Tours is the Coptic museum, even for those who are not Christian. More than simply an archive of Coptic history, it intricately weaves a web between religions at the end of the pagan era, and the beginning of the Christian period. It is a case study in the formative years of a major religion that grew, and sometimes intermingled, and sometimes borrowed from that of an ancient religion that it was replacing.

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