The Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the greatest repository of ancient Egyptian artefacts in the world, receives hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. But the general public has never seen many of its treasures, long kept in basement storerooms or recently discovered at ongoing excavations. To celebrate the centenary of the museum, many of these pieces of beauty or historical importance - and often both - have been gathered to form an exhibition in a converted section of the great basement storerooms of the museum. With some 250 artefacts from the earliest beginnings of pharaonic culture to its latest additions, the exhibition spans the whole of ancient Egyptian history. This book should be of interest to visitors to the exhibition as well as Egyptophiles everywhere.