The Egyptian and Near Eastern Collection

The collection grew from the Habsburg cabinet of curiosities, was enlarged by purchases in the nineteenth century and by Austrian excavations at Giza in the early twentieth, and today numbers some twelve thousand pieces. Its most remarkable object is the complete offering chapel of Kaninisut, a high official of the Old Kingdom, cut from his tomb at Giza and rebuilt here with its reliefs of servants bringing food, cattle and birds. Look also for the reserve heads, the eerie limestone portrait heads placed in Giza tombs about 2500 BC, and for the seated figure groups of families whose calm faces have survived four and a half thousand years. The Near Eastern section adds a lion of glazed brick from the processional way of Babylon.

The display mixes the monumental with the intimate. Children stop at the mummies and the crocodile; adults tend to linger over the wooden models of boats and bakeries and the painted linen mummy shrouds of the Roman period. The rooms are on the mezzanine to the right of the staircase, and because most visitors head straight up to the paintings, they are usually quiet.

Did You Know? The three pink granite columns in the first room are genuine Egyptian monuments, shipped to Vienna in the nineteenth century and built into the museum as it was constructed.