The popularization of thinking about space, a major fad centering on rockets and space exploration, reached an initial climax in the 1920s and 1930s. While writers and filmmakers were presenting their utopian visions of travel to the moon and distant planets to a broad public, scientists and engineers were hard at work on developing the rockets that would make space exploration a reality.

In the north wing of the New Museum, just past the small cupola-topped room housing the famous bust of Nefertiti, a number of highly fragile treasures await the visitor: ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern papyri, texts and drawings set down on writing material produced from the papyrus plant, bearing witness to humankind’s first cultures. Since 2008, Verena Lepper, who holds a doctorate in Egyptology, has been in charge of caring for and preserving the Egyptian Museum’s collection of 60,000 manuscripts and papyri.