Very, very nice set! Love this theme!

So was this the version that came with a big plastic sarcophagus thing or was that 5919?

Give me great small sets like this any day. They rammed so much into just 164 pieces. Love it.

Interestingly the contents of the tomb are interchangable. You can either put the sarcophagus on a hinge (treasure is hidden underneath), or the stone gravemarker that will drop a snake if you remove a pin.
Also, look at all those prints! They might not be accurate to the weathering of real-world tombs... if they had been opened. But they make the theme more colorful and vibrant, not to mention that the colors are surprisingly authentic.

It's stuff like that, and the trapdoor used as a way to access the tomb which also opens a snakepit, why I like Adventurers so much. The creativity and the traps are the best!

@PurpleDave said:
" @Brickalili said:
"So was this the version that came with a big plastic sarcophagus thing or was that 5919?"

5919 had the giant mummy. This one had a gold case.

@watcher21:
Brickset set listings show 5909 (there is no 5909-2) containing one more part than either 2879 or 5948, but there's no mention why. Rebrickable shows the piece counts being 197, 195, and 196 respectively, and says 5909 does come with the mummy container (which would account for the base and lid). There's no mention of why 5948 has one extra piece, but I'd guess it actually came with the gold case, not the mummy."

I just used http://peeron.com/inv/parts/x875

It was the 5919 version of the set I had, but either way I absolutely loved it as a kid. It was the biggest Adventurers location set that I had (at least until Orient Expedition came along), and I must have had absolutely hours of fun bringing together my entire Adventurers team (I had Harry and Kilroy from 5956 and Pippin from 5936 (albeit in the wrong outfit for the location)) to discover this place, going head to head with Mr. Hates and Slyboots (who I had from 5938) in their attempts to recover the Red Ruby*, outwit the skeleton guards (my skeletons from various sets tended to all join forces...!), and avoid getting eaten by snakes. Good times... I'm not sure I see as much play value in it these days as I got out of it back then, but my childhood imagination made this small building seem waaaaaay bigger than it actually was!

*In hindsight that's a redundant name, aren't all rubies red? But that was what the Lego Adventures comic strip called it, so that was the name I ran with too. The Curse of the Mummy puzzle adventure book gave it the proper name Re-Gou and attributed magical powers to it, rather than it just being valuable.

I even remember getting the set, at least vaguely. As a kid, birthdays were when I got most of my "big" Lego sets (these days it seems laughable to consider this set as "big", but the Mummy storage container in the version I had *did* increase the perceived size...), and I generally went to the small local toy shop a few days ahead of time with my mum to pick out which set I wanted. I believe it was like 2002 by this time, because I know this wasn't my first Mr. Hates/Sam Sinister/Baron Von Barron minifigure (that would be the one from 5920, a birthday gift from a friend in 2000), and it also couldn't have been 2001 because that was the year I got 7171 Mos Espa Podrace instead. I was surprised and enthralled to see that not only did the shop have an Adventurers Egypt set in stock these several years later, but it was one that I hadn't even known existed before! And while this set didn't have any minifigures in who I didn't already have versions of (unique minifigs usually being a major criteria in which sets I'd choose as a child), the prospect of revisiting one of the first themes I'd fallen in love with was just too good to miss!

I remember opening the set on my parents' bed the way I always did with birthday presents... and looking back at that year tells me that my birthday would have fallen on a Sunday then, which I think checks out; learning that brings back to me very hazy memories of building this set on my bedroom floor, before we headed out to church...

Of course, nowadays I much prefer my 5988, which I rebuilt from a used lot a few years ago, to this set; but I still found this one absolutely fantastic at the time!

@namekuji said:
"I too occasionally change tyres with a pickaxe and a revolver."

The building instructions showed Johnny Thunder as the one who drives this car, so this may actually be his enemy Baron sabotaging Johnny's car to strand him here, rather than trying to repair anything.

That said, other images on the box weren't so consistent; 5919's picture does show Baron driving it instead, so its anyone's guess to whom the car actually belongs...!

This set was what taught me the pronunciation of tomb (I mispronounced it and my parents corrected me).

@watcher21 said:
" @PurpleDave said:
" @Brickalili said:
"So was this the version that came with a big plastic sarcophagus thing or was that 5919?"

5919 had the giant mummy. This one had a gold case.

@watcher21:
Brickset set listings show 5909 (there is no 5909-2) containing one more part than either 2879 or 5948, but there's no mention why. Rebrickable shows the piece counts being 197, 195, and 196 respectively, and says 5909 does come with the mummy container (which would account for the base and lid). There's no mention of why 5948 has one extra piece, but I'd guess it actually came with the gold case, not the mummy."

I just used http://peeron.com/inv/parts/x875"

Ah, so Peeron has a comic book inventories as 5909-1, which explains why the set was pushed to 5909-2. Brickset doesn’t follow the exact same numbering convention, so 5909-1 was left available for the set.

I'd violate a few tombs to get sets as cool as this again on store shelves.

Seems to be some sort of Egyptian garage using whatever parts are available.