The Department of Egyptian Antiquities is the most popular at the Louvre. The permanent display of around 5,000 exhibits from the 60,000 housed by the department gives visitors the opportunity to discover this age-old civilisation, the works of art of which never fail to fascinate and generate admiration.

On 15 May 1826, a decree created the division of Egyptian monuments in the Royal Museum of the Louvre in Paris after Jean-François Champollion, an Egyptologist, convinced King Charles X to collect precious relics of ancient Egypt.

Champollion (1790–1832) is best known for using the Rosetta Stone to decipher the secrets of hieroglyphics in 1822. As founder of the science of Egyptology, he was appointed curator of the new division.

The Louvre’s collection of Egyptian antiquities was amassed by purchase, gift, and from archaeological excavations.

In the fifth century BCE the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the ‘Egyptians are the most religious of all people’. Devout they may have been, but the ancient Egyptians were nevertheless attached to the pleasures and practicalities of life. In the lush and fertile valley of the Nile, they enjoyed an agreeable existence that they were loath to leave in death.

The dead followed the setting sun into the west, where they entered the Underworld and began a long and dangerous journey to the Hall of Judgment. The reward of a true and virtuous life was access to the heavenly Field of Reeds.

To be reborn the Egyptians had to preserve the elements of themselves that made them individual, including their body, name, soul and vital force. By seeing Egyptian antiquities, and learning the names of the dead, we give them immortality and their longed-for chance to ‘do everything they used to do on this earth’.