The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization

This guide to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo opens in 1881, when a boatload of royal mummies sailed up the Nile and baffled customs officials wrote salted fish on the manifest while crowds on the riverbank wailed and fired rifles into the air. It follows one of those kings, Seqenenre Tao, whose skull bears wounds from an axe, a dagger and a spear from a battle fought to drive foreign rulers out of Egypt, his body buried in haste without proper embalming. Priests are said to have hidden this whole royal cache from tomb robbers three thousand years before that first strange river journey.