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Kom Aushim Museum (Karanis Site Museum)
History of the Fayoum from prehistory to the Islamic era
About
The museum introduces the history and traditions of the Fayoum through finds from Karanis and the wider oasis.
Kom Aushim Museum was built in 1974 at the entrance to the Greco-Roman town of Karanis in the northeast of the Fayoum, and a second floor was added in 1993. Closed for restoration in 2006, it reopened in November 2016 with a new thematic display of some 313 objects drawn from its own stores, the Kom Aushim excavations and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The collection traces the history, daily life and religious beliefs of the Fayoum from prehistory through the Pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Coptic and Islamic periods, and includes Fayoum mummy portraits, mummies and papyri. The surrounding site includes an open-air display of stone sculpture and architectural elements.
Why this museum matters
Exhibo editorial
At the entrance to Karanis, on the desert road into the Fayoum, a small two-storey building that tells the oasis's whole story in about three hundred objects. It opened in 1974, was closed for ten years from 2006 and reopened in 2016. What brings people here is the Fayoum itself: Fayoum mummy portraits — the painted faces on wood that bridge Roman portraiture and the Coptic icon — alongside mummies, papyri, crocodile-god figures, Coptic and Islamic objects from the region. Then you walk out of the door into Karanis, the Greco-Roman town whose papyri now fill a university collection in Michigan. Ten minutes inside, an hour among the ruins.
Visit
Hours, tickets, and directions for Kom Aushim Museum (Karanis Site Museum).
Address
Kom Aushim, Cairo–Fayoum Desert Road, at the entrance to Karanis, Tamiya, Fayoum, Egypt
Opening hours
- Monday
- 09:00 – 15:00
- Tuesday
- 09:00 – 15:00
- Wednesday
- 09:00 – 15:00
- Thursday
- 09:00 – 15:00
- Friday
- 09:00 – 15:00
- Saturday
- 09:00 – 15:00
- Sunday
- 09:00 – 15:00