The royal mummies in a darkened underground hall, and the only museum here that treats Egypt as continuous rather than ancient.
Opened fully in 2021 at Fustat, on the site of Egypt’s first Islamic capital, the NMEC does something neither of the other great Cairo museums attempts: it treats Egyptian civilisation as a continuous story rather than an ancient one.
The main gallery runs chronologically from prehistory through the pharaonic period, the Greco-Roman centuries, Coptic Christianity, the Islamic conquest, the Fatimids and Mamluks, the Ottomans, the nineteenth century and into the modern republic. A second set of galleries is thematic — dwelling, writing, the state, beliefs, the Nile.
For anyone who has spent three days looking at pharaohs, it is a corrective: Egypt did not stop in 30 BC.
The Royal Mummies Hall
The reason most people come, and it earns it.
Twenty-two royal mummies — eighteen kings and four queens, including Ramesses II, Seti I, Hatshepsut, Thutmose III and Ramesses III — moved here from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir in April 2021.
The move was staged as the Pharaohs’ Golden Parade: twenty-two vehicles designed to look like barques, carrying the mummies in nitrogen-filled cases through Cairo at night, with a 21-gun salute and a broadcast watched worldwide. Whatever one thinks of the theatre, the engineering was serious and the mummies travelled better than they had in a century.
The hall is underground, dark, at controlled temperature and humidity, with each mummy individually lit in a case alongside its coffin and CT-scan data. It is silent, and it is handled with considerably more dignity than the old display in Tahrir.
No photography. This is enforced.
The building and the setting
A modern low building beside Ain al-Sira lake, in Fustat — the settlement founded by Amr ibn al-As in 641, which was Egypt’s capital before al-Qahira existed.
Practicalities
Separate tickets for the general galleries and the Royal Mummies Hall, or a combined one. Allow three hours.
Metro Line 1 to El-Malek El-Saleh and a short taxi, or Uber directly.
It is comfortably air-conditioned throughout, which makes it a good choice for the hottest part of the day.
Combining it
It is a short taxi from Coptic Cairo and the Amr ibn al-As Mosque, and the three together make a coherent day about the layers between the pharaohs and the medieval city.
More Museums
The Grand Egyptian Museum
Two decades late, a kilometre from the pyramids, and holding the complete Tutankhamun collection for the first time.
The Egyptian Museum, Tahrir
The old pink museum on Tahrir Square, crowded, under-labelled, and still one of the great collections on earth.
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.