Nevine
El-Aref enjoys a trip back to the age of the pyramid builders in the Japanese
city of Toyama.
Residents
and visitors to the Japanese city of Toyama fell under the spell of the Giza
Pyramids last week on the opening of the sixth leg of the Golden Pharaohs and
Pyramids touring exhibition in Japan.
Posters
of the Great Pyramids at Giza, the pharaoh Khufu’s solar boat, the golden mask
of Amenemopet, the limestone pyramidion of Ry and Maya, the black basalt statue
of Khafre and jewelry embellished with precious stones have been decorating the
walls of Toyama train station, shops, hotels and streets.
For
the next two months, Toyama residents will be able to travel back in time to
the ancient Egyptian civilisation and explore one of its most important and
powerful eras – the Old Kingdom, the age of the Pyramid builders.
A
gala ceremony was organised at the Toyama Civic Centre last Friday to celebrate
the opening of the exhibition, with Japanese officials, Egyptologists and
curators gathering to attend the inauguration.
Among them were Kiyotsugu
Yamashi, president of Tulip TV which organised the exhibition, and Osamu
Yamamato, director-general of civic affairs and culture at the Toyama
prefectural government.
The
Egyptian delegation was headed by Gharib Sonbol, head of restoration at the
ministry of antiquities in Cairo. The present exhibition is the first ancient
Egyptian exhibition to tour Japan after a three-year hiatus following the
Tutankhamun: Golden Age of the Pharaohs touring exhibition in 2012.
That
exhibition was cut short and returned to Egypt before the end of the planned
tour after some Egyptian archaeologists filed a lawsuit against the ministry in
the aftermath of the 25 January Revolution. The lawsuit sought to end the
sending of touring exhibitions of ancient Egyptian artefacts abroad.
The
present exhibition was inaugurated in October 2015 in the Japanese capital
Tokyo and is scheduled to tour seven other cities in Japan over a 25-month
period, including Matsuyama, Sendai, Kagoshima, Kyoto, Toyama, Fukuoka, and
Shizuoka.
“The exhibition does not only shed light on the Old Kingdom and the
age of the Pyramid builders, but also highlights the strong bilateral
relationship between Egypt and Japan in all domains,” minister of antiquities
Khaled Al-Enany told the Weekly.
He added that the exhibition was a very good
opportunity to promote tourism and to encourage Japanese tourists to return to
Egypt.
Al-Enany
said that Egyptian-Japanese cooperation in the cultural field was being seen in
many distinguished projects. Among the most important was the Grand Egyptian
Museum (GEM) overlooking the Giza Plateau which will put on display 100,000
artefacts and welcome millions of visitors every year.
“This is thanks to the
Japanese government and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) for
their continuous efforts and support in offering two soft loans to complete one
of the most important cultural projects in the world,” El-Enany said.
In
addition, Japan had provided technical and scientific support through the
provision of scientific equipment and materials to the GEM’s conservation
centre. There are also many joint Egyptian-Japanese missions at various
archaeological sites in Egypt that have yielded important results.
Waseda
University, for example, has been excavating in Egypt since 1966, and was
amongst the first foreign institutions to introduce advanced technological
tools to better understand Egypt’s archaeology.
One
of the University’s recent projects is the exploration of Khufu’s second solar
boat in its pit on the Giza Plateau. “The exhibition is the first of its kind
in Japan,” Sakuhi Yoshimura, president of the Higashi Nippon International
University in Japan and the exhibition’s supervisor, told the Weekly, adding
that exhibitions featuring the Pyramids were rare throughout the world... READ MORE.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Your feedback is important to us!
We invite all our readers to share with us their views and comments about this article.