Eight million people visit the Louvre every year, and most of them sprint past the Egyptian wing on their way to Mona Lisa. They miss the best stories in the building.
Start with the seated scribe from 2500 BC. He sits cross-legged, paint still bright on his chest, eyes made of rock crystal that follow you across the room. He is not a pharaoh or a god—just a man who could read and write when almost nobody could. His calm gaze survived four and a half thousand years.
A few rooms further stands the Great Sphinx of Tanis, a pink granite lion with a human head weighing seventeen tons. It guarded a temple long before Paris existed. When French archaeologists dug it up in 1825, they needed thirty men and a week to move it. Today schoolchildren walk past without looking up.
The strangest object is a small wooden label found tied to a mummy’s toe. It reads, in hieratic script, “The singer of Amun, Tjenenetmeh, may she live.” She was not royalty, just a woman who loved music. Someone wrote her name so she would not be forgotten. The label is displayed in a corner case most people never reach. Her name has now outlasted the entire civilization that tried to erase it.