Treasures of Ancient Egypt on display at Belarus' National Art Museum

The exclusive exhibition, a product of the ten-year work of an international team of Egyptologists, opened at the Belarusian National Art Museum. Minsk, which turned 950 this year, became the first stop in the long European tour: Treasures of Ancient Egypt will head for Moscow in December and then continue the tour in Bucharest…

Now Minsk residents and guests to the capital have an opportunity to go deep into the ancient history and see some truly priceless museum pieces, both authentic ones and also those restored by Egyptian specialists. The exhibition now has quite an appropriate setting: four halls of the National Art Museum have been painted black, which makes a pretty effective addition to the music and lights to make an encounter with pharaohs and sphinxes even more impressive.

Many exhibits are replicas of the artifacts displayed at the museums of Cairo, Washington, D.C., London, and Berlin. According to the project’s organizers, the best Egyptian restorers re-created them as precisely as possible using ancient techniques. Other exhibits are fragments of sarcophagi, textiles, many-thousand-year-old jewelry, and household items. The National Art Museum offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see such a collection, which no other museum in the world can provide.

More than 300 museum pieces tell a story about a civilization full of mysteries and myths. Among them are sphinxes, statues of gods, mummies, sarcophagi, amulets, papyrus… A special highlight is a golden throne and a replica of Tutankhamun’s death mask.

Moreover, this artifact made the project… spill into the streets of Minsk. The organizers offer to take part in the Tutankhamun’s Curse quest: participants are to find capsules with 30 fragments hidden across the capital by 10 December to put together a mask in the museum.

According to the quest’s story, in the 16th century Prince Radziwill left Nesvizh to find pharaoh’s ancient secret of embalming. Once he learned the secret, a curse was put on him, which can be dispelled by Tutankhamun’s mask. There is no proof of this story but some scientists do believe that Belarusian nobles were in possession of secret embalming recipes. The fragments of the mask are hidden in such places across Minsk, which can resemble the exhibits and even the charm of Egypt. The main prize is a tour to this amazing country.

Before the exhibition moves to Moscow, the Belarusian National Art Museum will also host lectures and master classes on Wednesdays, where guests will learn to read Egyptian hieroglyphs, put special decorative and medical makeup, and mold their own masterpieces out of clay using ancient recipes…