A prime tourist attraction, the museum was the site of a September shooting that killed nine Germans and their Egyptian driver in a bus in the parking lot. Tourism has been recovering slowly since that massacre and a November terrorist attackthat killed 58 tourists outside aPharaonic temple in the southern city of Luxor. However, much can be done to improve the existing museum. Take the lack of light in the central atrium, for instance. In other galleries, the large windows let in too much light.
Visitors peer through their own reflections in the display cabinet glass.
William Ward, the Cleveland designer who revamped the Tutankhamen and adjoining galleries, blacked out the windows and illuminated the items with lights diffused through frosted glass. In the atrium, Ward would like to block out the windows behind the colossal statues of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye, where the incoming light wrecks one's view. But Ward says the museum's lighting can't be overhauled without installing air conditioning. There are towering statues of pharaohs, hundreds of tiny carvings of gods, sandals made of sheet gold, alabaster sculptures, frescoes of waterfowl and reeds, coffins and children's rattles from thousands of years ago. But after a while the visitor feels pulled in all directions.