Two decades late, a kilometre from the pyramids, and holding the complete Tutankhamun collection for the first time.
The Grand Egyptian Museum sits about two kilometres from the Giza plateau, aligned so that the pyramids are framed through the glass of its atrium. It covers around half a million square metres and is the largest archaeological museum in the world devoted to a single civilisation.
It has also been one of the most delayed cultural projects anywhere. Ground was broken in 2005, opening was announced for 2011, then 2012, 2015, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023 and beyond, derailed in turn by the revolution, funding, the pandemic and regional instability. It opened in stages, with partial access preceding the full opening.
Check what is currently open before you go. This site would rather say that than print a date that has moved eight times.
The building
Heneghan Peng won the competition in 2003 with a design that uses the sight lines to the pyramids as its organising geometry. The front is a vast translucent wall of triangulated alabaster-effect panels; behind it a grand staircase rises six storeys, lined with monumental statuary arranged chronologically, ending at a window with the pyramids in it.
A colossus of Ramesses II, eleven metres and eighty-three tonnes, stands in the atrium. It was moved here in 2018 from Ramses Square in Downtown, where it had stood in traffic fumes since 1955.
Tutankhamun
The reason most people come. For the first time since Howard Carter cleared the tomb between 1922 and 1932, the complete collection of over 5,000 objects is displayed together in dedicated galleries — the gold mask, the coffins, the chariots, the beds, the shrines, the sandals, the folding camp bed.
Previously most of it was in storage or split between Tahrir and elsewhere, and only a fraction was ever on view.
The Khufu boat
The cedar vessel found dismantled in a sealed pit beside the Great Pyramid in 1954, some 43 metres long, reassembled from 1,224 pieces. It was moved from its museum at Giza to the GEM in 2021 in a specially built vehicle over two days.
Practicalities
Allow a full day. It is genuinely enormous and the pace of the galleries is slow.
Tickets are booked online, with tiered pricing and separate Tutankhamun access at times. Egyptian and foreign pricing differ substantially, as at all Egyptian sites.
There is no metro. Taxi or Uber from Downtown takes 45 minutes to an hour.
What about the old museum
The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir is still open and still worth visiting. The collections are being redistributed between it, the GEM and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation, so what is where has been changing. See its own entry.
More Museums
The Egyptian Museum, Tahrir
The old pink museum on Tahrir Square, crowded, under-labelled, and still one of the great collections on earth.
National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation
The royal mummies in a darkened underground hall, and the only museum here that treats Egypt as continuous rather than ancient.
Museum of Islamic Art
One of the finest collections of Islamic art anywhere, rebuilt after a car bomb destroyed the front of it in 2014.