More ideas in our Egypt Travel Special

The world's great museums, you can count them on the fingers of one hand; and way up there, with the Louvre, the Met, and of course the British Museum, is that dusty, musty old collection of utterly astounding antiquities, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. No modern, well-lit, carefully laid-out exhibition this - it's a museum like they used to make them, with lots of exhibits in long galleries and precious little by way of explanation, but oh boy, what exhibits!

The museum's most famous possessions, of course, are the treasures found by Howard Carter in the tomb of Tutankhamun, the gilded statues, the thrones, the alabaster canopic jars, the exquisite gold jewellery, and the centrepiece, the emblem of the whole collection, that fabulous, jaw-dropping, solid gold, inlaid funeral mask, all eleven kilos of it. Tut's treasures alone need a good hour or two to take in, but even without them, this would still be, for all its higgledy-piggledy dusty old layout, one of the world's top museums, and a must-see by any standards.

Really you need a couple of visits at least to take it all in, but if you only have a day and you want to see the very top highlights, the first thing to do when you enter the museum is to go straight ahead, right through the atrium, until you get to the other end, where the Amarna gallery (room #3) is dedicated to the reign of one very special pharaoh, Tutankamun's father, the heretic king Akhenaten. A revolutionary who threw out Egypt's entire pantheon of gods and replaced them with worship of the sun disk alone, Akhenaten also brought in a whole new style of art, immediately recognizable, and completely different from everything that went before or since. The statues of him that stare down at you from both sides of the room are stylized and strange, with flared nostrils that would have done Kenneth Williams proud. But then all the art in this room is odd: elongated faces, pot bellies, family scenes (most untypical of Egyptian royalty) - scholars still dispute whether the wierd shape of Akhenaten's body, as depicted in the statues here, were due to some artistic quirk of his time, or a genuine deformity that really made him look like that.

On your way to the Amarna room, as you pass through the museum's central atrium, there are two more things to look out for. One is the Palette of Narmer, a flat tablet of beautifully carved smooth black stone commemorating the foundation of Egypt itself, formed from the two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3000 BC. Also in the atrium area, and also on black basalt, if rather younger (dating only from around 1200 BC), Merneptah's victory stela celebrates that pharaoh's triumph against the mysterious "Sea Peoples", the most famous of whom were the Philistines, and in passing, mentions the crushing of one of the Philistines' most implacable foes, a people called Israel, who are not referred to on any other ancient Egyptian artefact whatsoever.

In the galleries on the west side things not to miss include the Meidum Geese in room #32, a fresco so fresh and realistic you might think it was modern, but actually this naturalistic depiction dates from the fourth dynasty, which makes it about four and a half thousand years old. In the same room, two statues of pharaoh Pepi I and his son, made with the unusual technique of hammering sheets of copper onto wooden cores, are among the museum's most fascinating pieces of sculpture.

The museum's most interesting statue of all, however, does not depict royalty at all, but a priest called Ka-aper. Strikingly realistic, the wooden likeness in room #42, all of four foot high, could easily be of someone you'd meet on the streets of Cairo today. Indeed, the workers on the dig where it was found called it "Sheikh al-Balad" (chief of the village) because it looked so much like their own village headman.

A few rooms further along, in room #12, a relief shows the queen of Punt, a land with which Egypt traded for spices and incense. Nobody knows where Punt was, but Somalia or Eritrea is a likely guess. The queen herself is shown to be a most unusual shape, by Egyptian standards, particularly fat around the hips and thighs. Some have suggested the relief is a caricature, or even that she suffered from elephantiasis, but a more likely explanation is what is known as steatopygia, an accumulation of fat in those areas that is typical of southern African Khoisan peoples like the San Bushmen of Namibia. What it may mean therefore is that in 1470 BC or so, when the relief was made, the people who lived in Punt were Khoisan, related to the San of Namibia rather than to the people who live in East Africa today.

On the other side of the ground floor, in room #24, is the most engaging statue of an Egyptian deity, the pregnant hippopotamus goddess Taweret, an absolute icon of motherhood. Smooth and sleek, the basalt statue was found in a sealed shrine, which explains its amazing state of preservation.

The last highlight is hidden away in room #14 upstairs, and is something a little bit different: the Fayoum Portraits from the second or third centuries BC, which belong to the art of Greece and Rome rather than classical ancient Egypt. Painted in wax and tempera, these lifelike portraits were made during the lifetime of the deceased and placed over the face on the coffin after death. Utterly Mediterranean in appearance, they seem to capture the very personality of their sitters, and you can almost imagine talking to them, though they died over two millennia ago (and didn't speak English anyway).

The Rough Guide to Egypt fourth edition was published in August, priced £15.99, and is available from the Rough Guides website