Ismailia - Museum

To the east of the Garden of the Stelae is a small but very interesting Museum containing antiquities from the Canal Zone. So much destruction was caused by war and political disturbances that little material of the early period has survived. Outside the entrance to the museum is a sphinx found during the construction of the Canal. On the walls of the museum are displayed a number of mosaic pavements, including one with representations of Phaedra and Hippolytus and the Dionysiac mysteries and with Greek verses, surrounded by birds. Other exhibits include Graeco-Egyptian terracottas and bronze figures (many of them from Tell el-Maskhuta). In the museum garden are fragments of a stela set up by Darius to commemorate the completion of the first freshwater canal 5mi/8km north of Suez, with a hieroglyphic inscription and cuneiform inscriptions in the Persian, Babylonian and Elamite languages.