At the northern end of the Nile Shopping Centre below the Corniche, Luxor’s Mummification Museum (daily : summer 9am – 1pm & 5-10; winter 9am – 1pm & 4-9 pm ; no photography ) devotes more space to the beliefs surrounding death and the afterlife than to the actual practice of mummification and hardly breaks new ground. It does, however, display a spoon and spatula used to remove the deceased’s brain ( which was discarded by the Egyptians as an important organ), and a finely-preserved mummy of Maser-harti, a XXI Dynasty high priest of Amun. In wintertime on Sundays at 7pm there is a free archeological lecture by such experts as Kent Weeks ( studying tomb KV5 in the Valley of the Kings) and Zbigniew Szafranski ( of the Polish Mission at Deir el-Bahri). Visitors can consult the museum’s Egyptology reference library (daily 9am – 6pm ; free).