Is Egypt still  on your Bucket list? And you don’t know when you can go? The Metropolitan Museum in New York is a good alternative. Besides thousands and thousands of Egyptian artifacts, it has the totally reconstructed Temple of Dendur, the Tomb of Perneb (2381 – 2323 BC), and even Cleopatra’s Needle, (Obelisk)

With only one exception these items have all been brought here from Egypt.  The exception is the gallery, in front of the auditorium, where hundreds of wall painting from Egyptian tombs are displayed.  

I have gone to the Metropolitan Museum longer than I want to admit, and never knew that these beautiful and diversified paintings are Facsimiles and not originals. It took a lecture of Dr. Monica Hanna who guided us through the Egyptian wing to find out.

In 1907 the Museum created the Graphic Section of the Egyptian Expedition. Norman de Garis Davies was hired to oversee the work, assisted by his wife Nina. She helped him develop a copying technique that almost exactly simulates the colors and brushstrokes seen on the tomb walls. Most of them are painted at a 1:1 scale, and show deliberately damage and loss suffered over 1000 of years.

The tomb paintings were copied from cemeteries of Western Thebes, royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, as well as tombs of officials living in the village of Deir el-Medina.

The following pictures, are just a small sampling, nothing compared to the impact the  gallery will have on you – it might even make you feel like you were in the Valley of the Kings!?

….and the best part is that the originals wall decorations are still in Egypt, in the place they were meant to be and the Egyptian people are not deprived of their heritage.

More from Egypt soon

Brigitte