Ramses & the Pharaoh’s Gold Touring Exhibition, 2021 – 2025

Now one of the most famous museums in the world, the Louvre was a Royal residence. A 12 century fortress became a residence for Charles V in the mid 14th century, when he abandoned the Palais de la Cité. Since then it the principle residence of kings of France until the French Revolution, when parts of it became a public museum. The museum now occupies the entire complex. Collections include art and antiquities from France and Mediterranean Europe (Etruscan, Greek and Roman). There are also substantial collections of Egyptian and Near Eastern antiquities, from late prehistory to the start of Christian and Islamic periods.

At the bottom of the Champs Elysées and set in the centre of one of the most well known traffic circles in the world stands an Egyptian obelisk from the Luxor Temple. The so-called Luxor Obelisk is made of red granite, measures 22.5 metres in height and weighs an estimated 227 tonnes. This obelisk and its pair, that still stands in front of the first pylon of the temple in Luxor, were the largest obelisks to have been erected by Ramses II; others were set up at temples in Heliopolis and Tanis. The obelisk arrived in France on 10 May 1833. And on 25 October the obelisk was raised watched on by King Louis-Philippe I and an eager crowd.

Devoted primarily to the art of the Middle Ages, the Musée de Cluny occupies one of Paris’ oldest surviving buildings, a late 15th-century Gothic mansion built for the Abbot of Cluny. It was in the 19th century that this lavish structure became home to a museum, and today its most important treasure is probably The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, created around 1500. Accompanying its medieval heritage, the museum also encompasses the frigidarium of a Gallo-Roman bathhouse and displays important Roman-era artefacts like the Pillar of the Boatmen.