The basement of the Cairo Museum is an interesting place, and there are many things to be learned and discovered here. I would like to share the story of why I decided to change the basement when I became the head of antiquities in 2002.

The story begins when I was a young man working on an excavation in the Delta at a site called Kom Abu Billu. This was at a time when I did not want to be an archaeologist. In fact, I really hated it. I used to sit in my tent and wish I were doing something else. The site of Kom Abu Billu was actually a very important archaeological site, but at that time I did not realize that.

Our excavations uncovered temples, tombs and cemeteries. Every year we would bring over 60 boxes full of artefacts to the Museum, and the director would store them in the basement without looking at them. Years after the excavations, when I began to see the importance of the site and the artefacts we found, I began to ask every director of the Cairo Museum to find the boxes, but no one knew where they had stored the boxes from Kom Abu Billu. Finally, when I asked Sabah, she came to the basement and found these boxes.

Now I can see this beautiful statue that ignited my love of archaeology, although I haven’t touched it in more than 25 years. In the middle of a tomb, we found this statue, and when I began to clean it, I found it was a statue of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty for the Greeks This goddess was equated with Venus in ancient Rome and Hathor in ancient Egypt. When I found it, I took my brush and cleaned it, and when it was uncovered I knew I had found my love, archaeology. When we celebrated the centennial anniversary of the museum in 2002, I cleaned an area of the basement so that we could use it as a permanent exhibit.

When I saw the nice lighting and design, I decided to make the whole basement like this.