Egyptian Museum
The traveller who arrives at Midan Tahrir for the first time finds, on its north-western corner, a dignified pink-limestone building in the late French neoclassical style: arcaded at the ground, flanked by two low wings, approached by a shallow flight of steps flanked by two reclining sphinxes. This is the Egyptian Museum — the country's first purpose-built museum of antiquities, opened in November 1902 to a design by the French architect Marcel Dourgnon, which had won an international competition six years earlier against forty-eight other submissions. For more than a century it was the principal destination for every visitor to Egypt. In the new configuration — with the Grand Egyptian Museum absorbing the Tutankhamun material and the royal statuary — Tahrir has become something subtler and, in our view, more rewarding: a patient, deeply stocked museum of Pharaonic civilisation whose strengths are at last given the space they deserve.
I. The building
Dourgnon's plan is straightforward in principle: a central rotunda under a shallow dome, with radiating axial halls extending east, west and south; a tall central atrium with Roman-pattern mosaics in the floor; and an ambulatory upper level ringing the rotunda and giving onto the upper galleries. The limestone came from Helwan; the iron-and-glass skylights, in an extraordinary piece of period engineering, from the French firm of Eiffel. The building is entered, properly, by its original south gate on the square, though in our own time the security controls have redirected most visitors to a side entrance on the Nile-facing elevation.
II. The Royal Mummy Hall
The single most significant holding at Tahrir, following the Tutankhamun transfer, is the Royal Mummy Hall: a long, low, carefully climate-controlled gallery in which twenty-two mummies of kings and queens of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties — including Seti I, Ramesses II, Hatshepsut, and the New Kingdom queen Ahmose-Nefertari — lie in state. The hall was reorganised in 2021 after the remarkable Pharaohs' Golden Parade, in which the royal mummies were ceremonially transferred from their old home to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation at Fustat; the Tahrir hall now presents a selection that has returned on permanent loan, the display refined and the lighting subdued to conservational standards.
III. The Narmer Palette and the foundation of a kingdom
In Gallery 43, on the ground floor, stands one of the most important objects in all of Egyptian archaeology: the Narmer Palette, a sixty-three-centimetre shield-shaped schist slab carved in the predynastic period and unearthed at Hierakonpolis in 1898. On its two faces, the king Narmer — possibly the first unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt — is shown smiting a foe, wearing the combined crowns of the Two Lands. The palette is universally regarded as the earliest historical document in Egyptian civilisation, and its position in a museum founded in the year of its discovery's centenary is a happy circularity.
IV. The Meidum Geese and the question of forgery
The Meidum Geese, a painted plaster frieze of six waterfowl rendered with astonishing naturalism and dated — by most scholars — to the reign of Sneferu in the early Fourth Dynasty, have long been one of the most popular objects in the museum. In recent years a respected Italian Egyptologist has argued that the frieze is a nineteenth-century forgery, pointing to anomalies in the pigment analysis; an equally respected counter-argument has defended the painting's authenticity. The museum has responded admirably: the label now presents both views side by side, leaving the visitor to arrive at her own conclusion. It is a rare and scholarly humility.
V. The basement and the upper floor
The basement holds a refreshed display of Old and Middle Kingdom statuary — including the famous seated scribe Hemiunu and the painted pair Rahotep and Nofret, whose eyes of inlaid rock crystal startled every nineteenth-century visitor and continue to startle every twenty-first. The upper floor, freed of its Tutankhamun crowds, now reads as the museum's great gallery of daily life: jewellery, stelae, ceramic, wooden models of boats and workshops from the tombs of Deir el-Bahri, and the endlessly charming Middle Kingdom funerary models of weavers, brewers and scribes at their work.
VI. Practical suggestion
Allow four hours. The museum is dense — it would be possible to spend a week among the hundred and twenty thousand objects in its collection — but a careful four-hour visit, taking in the rotunda, the Royal Mummy Hall, the Narmer Palette, the Meidum Geese and the daily-life upper floor, is the right shape for most pass-holders. The on-site café is modest; better to cross the square afterwards for a long lunch at one of the Talaat Harb establishments and return, if time allows, for a second short visit to a single gallery that has lingered in the mind.