The effects of the ancient Egyptians in Aswan spread in a challenging way to count. The Aswan Museum on Elephantine Island was one of the attempts to annex several ancient monuments in one place. The choice came for the villa of William Wilcox. He was one of the engineers who supervised the construction of the old Aswan Dam and during excavation work required to construct the High Dam. Archaeologists discovered numerous monuments from various eras and combined them with their holdings.
The museum features artefacts from Nubia, which were housed there during the construction of the Aswan Dam. It was set up in 1912 by the British Egyptologist Cecil Mallaby Firth. In 1990, the government inaugurated a new department, displaying findings discovered on the Elephantine Islands. These findings include such as utensils, weapons, pottery, and mummies.
In the vicinity, the Aswan Museum includes the temple of Khnum, a statue of the god of Khnum in the shape of a ram head, many Nubian monuments and relics from Elephantine Island, and ancient relics dating back to prehistoric times. This collection made it one of the most prominent tourist attractions in Aswan.
Location of Aswan Museum
Aswan Museum is in Elephantine, located on the south-eastern side of Aswan, Egypt. The museum is close to the Ruins of Abu, where excavations are still occurring.
Museum contents
The museum possesses many statues of kings and individuals, some mummies of the ram, the symbol of the god “Khnum”. It also contains various types of pottery, architectural and decorative elements, several sarcophagi, tools of daily life, and some funerary paintings. It includes some of the antiquities the mission found during its excavations for many years on the island. In recent years, the German mission excavating in Elephantine, in cooperation with the Supreme Council of Antiquities, established an annexe to the old museum to the north.
The museum also includes a garden, caves carved with rock carvings, minarets in the Islamic style, and a Nubian house surrounded by a lake. Also, it has the Temple of the God Satet, the Temple of Haqanaan Ayb, and a Nilometer on the territory.
Development of Aswan Museum
Between 1991 and 1993, architects added a new annexe to the Aswan Museum called the Incs. They found it on Elephantine Island, about ten meters north of the Aswan Museum. The area of the museum annexe is about 220 square meters. It has three exhibition halls and a glass ceiling, topped by a concrete roof and crowned in the central region in a hierarchical form—the German Archaeological Institute on Elephantine Island from 1969 until 1997.
After closing a period since the January 2011 revolution, the Minister of Antiquities decided to reopen the Aswan Museum on Elephantine Island again to foreign tourists. The opening coincides with 100 years since the museum’s establishment in 1917.
