Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection

(Local Name: Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung) The Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin is housed in the eastern part of the Neo-Classical Stülerbau (Stüler Building: in the western part of the Museum of Antiquities), which was erected by Friedrich August Stüler opposite Charlottenburg Palace in 1850, and also in the old Royal Stables. It displays some 1,500 works of art and culture from Ancient Egypt, of the period from 5000 B.C. to A.D. 300.

The most important works of art are in thirteen rooms on the ground and middle floors of the main building. The three aisles of the Royal Stables, with their decorative iron pillars manufactured in Berlin in the middle of the 19th C., have since 1983 housed the Cultural History Collection, arranged according to subject matter. The most celebrated exhibits are the limestone head of Queen Nefertiti (c. 1350 B.C.), wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Echnaton and part of the head of King Echnaton, initiator of a short-lived religious reform c. 1350 B.C. The Amarna family altar (depicting Nefertiti and Echnaton with three of their six daughters) and the "Walk in the Garden" (the royal couple when young), portrait masks from the workshop of the sculptor Thutmosis in Amarna, a small ebony head of Queen Teje, Echnaton's mother (c. 1370 B.C. and the funerary stele of a royal sculptor named Bak and his wife.

Works from the fifth Dynasty (around 2400 B.C. include a portrait of an anonymous married couple, and one of Hetepni dating from the sixth Dynasty (around 2150 B.C.). Chief among later important works of art is the head of a priest in green stone.

All visitors to the Royal Stables have to pass the Kalabscha Gate, presented to the Federal Republik by the Egyptian Government in gratitude for German financial and technical help in rescuing archaeological treasures endangered by the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

The cultural history collection in the Royal Stables embraces everyday utensils, statues, reliefs, tomb furnishings, scarabs, bronze and terra-cotta figures, coffins and mummy masks and a papyrus collection, all providing a complete picture of Ancient Egyptian culture. The room with its four divisions also houses examples of Egyptian death cults, including a double coffin with the mummy and mummy mask of Ta-scherit-en-Hor ("Daughter of Horus") from the Ptolemaic Period. When the New Museum has been rebuilt -- which may well take a further ten years -- it is intended that the Egyptian Collections should return to Museum Island and be united with the exhibits of the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection at present housed there in the Bode Museum.