Royal Jewelry Museum and Lbrary of Alexandria

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The Royal Jewelry Museum houses major jewelry pieces and art acquisitions of the dynasty of Mohammed Ali and his descendants, who ruled Egypt for nearly 150 years from 1805 until the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Following the Revolution, the jewelry left by the Royal Family was kept secure and unseen until a 1986 decree by President Mubarak was issued to assign Princess Fatima Al-Zahra'Palace in Alexandria as a special museum to house those pieces. I have attached photos of some of my favorite pieces.

The Library of Alexandria was the most famous in the ancient world, home to an unsurpassed collection of manuscripts, codices and many thousands of papyrus scrolls. The Library’s destruction is a matter of historical debate. The Roman historian Plutarch blames an out-of-control fire set by Julius Caesar in 48 BC, while other roman sources place the blame on the emperor Theodosius’s order to destroy all non-christian temples. Still other sources find fault with the Aran caliph Umar the Great’s conquest of the city in 642 AD. In 1970, plans were made to build the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, an enormous complexe of librairies, museums, theatres, art galleries and even a planetarium. The new Bibliotheca recalls the majesty of the ancient library, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, and pays homage to Alexandria’s legacy as a center of scholarship.

The building takes the form of a gigantic angled discus embedded in the ground, evoking a second sun rising out of the Mediterranean. The granite exterior walls are carved with letters, pictograms, hieroglyphs and symbols from more than 120 different human scripts. Inside, the jaw-dropping main reading room can accommodate eight million books and 2500 readers under its sloping roof, with windows specially designed to let sunlight flood in but keep out rays that might harm the collections.

This terminates our trip to Egypt. Tomorrow we return to Cairo to catch our plane home Tuesday morning..

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