Imhotep Museum

This guide to the Imhotep Museum in Cairo follows Jean-Philippe Lauer, a French engineer who stepped off a boat at Saqqara in 1926 for an eight-month job and stayed until he died at ninety-nine, seventy-five years later, chasing a collapsed wall around the Step Pyramid. You'll hear about the hall built around his manuscripts, photographs and handmade model, and about the finds displayed elsewhere in the museum: a fragment of King Djoser's statue naming his architect Imhotep, painted coffins, and a Ptolemaic mummy pulled from Djoser's funerary complex. Start in the lobby with the Djoser fragment before working back to Lauer's own room.