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What's in the Basement of the Cairo Museum?

While excavation above ground continues in Egypt at an accelerated pace under the publicity-minded watch of Zahi Hawass, director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, ancient artifacts pulled from ancient soil over the past 100 years face obscurity and the risk of damage inside the basement at the Cairo Museum.

The basement of the museum is kept off-limits to most people though recently an Associated Press reporter was allowed in for a visit. The visit was permitted by Hawass to help garner some pre-show press buzz for an upcoming exhibition that he is organizing to show off about 150 objects pulled from the nearly 100,000 thought to reside in the basement depths. That's about 0.15-percent of the objects in storage there.

Damage. loss, and theft are not the only potential threats facing these objects.

Most of the objects are poorly catalogued and most are unpublished -- a travesty considering the tremendous amount of active scholarly work by the international community. Even Hawass admits that even he can't locate boxes of material he personally excavated in the 1970s and subsequently sent to the museum.

To be sure, not all of the objects are masterpieces. Many are reportedly "duplicates" and "overflow" from other museums.

Egypt plans to open a new museum in Cairo in about five years. Assuming funding and government commitment remain intact, some of the basement objects may actually be seen by members of the public, someday.

The current plight of these unpublished, dusty and unorganized antiquities, however, once again underscores the opportunity that few museums have grasped. The notion that publishing and deaccessioning common objects to the legitimate market could solve many of today's toughest problems: funding (revenue could be generated from the sales); lack of storage (selling common objects could ensure adequate space for masterworks); care of all objects (collectors are incentivized to care for their objects because they are making significant investment in acquiring them).

As Hawass has been scouring the antiquities market to confiscate high-profile objects he believes may have left Egypt in the past 20 years, it is unlikely that he will adopt such a progressive approach to managing the objects in storage. In the meantime, dust accumulates and a significant void in our knowledge of ancient Egypt remains.