Grand Egyptian Museum

It took forty years. The cornerstone was laid in 2002, the international architectural competition (won by the Dublin practice of Heneghan Peng with a deliberately modest entry) had been concluded in 2003, construction began in 2012 after a long interregnum of Egyptian political turbulence, and the public galleries opened in stages between 2023 and 2025. Every delay, as those who lived through them will attest, was the better for the project. The Grand Egyptian Museum that finally opened on the Giza plateau is the most considered museum to be built anywhere in the world in the present century.

I. The building on the ridge

The complex sits on a ridge two kilometres east of the Great Pyramid, on the exact axis that links the pyramid to the cairo ring road — a sightline deliberately chosen so that, from the upper galleries, the pharaonic past is framed continuously against the modern city. The building rises in a translucent alabaster curtain of thirteen interlocking stone chevrons; at dusk the alabaster, lit from within, seems to glow faintly pink, an effect the architects confess they neither predicted nor fully understand. The public areas measure some ninety thousand square metres; the total footprint, including the conservation block, the rear-of-house and the vast underground archive, is just over five hundred thousand.

II. The grand staircase

A visitor who enters through the atrium is delivered, by a gentle six-storey processional ramp, into the Grand Staircase: a single architectural space climbing eighty metres from the lobby to the top of the museum, lined on both sides with eighty-seven colossal royal statues drawn from the entire dynastic sequence. The effect — it is worth saying plainly — is overwhelming. Visitors typically ascend the staircase in slow stages, pausing at the Middle Kingdom Mentuhoteps, at the Eighteenth Dynasty Amenhoteps, at the serenely seated Ramesses II whose head arrives at the visitor's eye as the staircase levels off at the third floor. At the summit, a single tall window frames the Pyramid of Khufu. This is, intentionally, the emotional climax of the building.

III. The Tutankhamun galleries

The principal holding of the museum is of course the Tutankhamun material. For the first time since Howard Carter's 1922 discovery, the five thousand and more objects from the tomb are assembled in a single suite of interconnected rooms — designed by a small Cairo-based practice (Atelier Youssef el-Sharkawy, no relation to our founder's namesake) to echo the layout of the original tomb. The visitor moves through the antechamber material, past the annex, into the burial chamber, and finally into the treasury, where the gilded shrine, the alabaster canopic chest, the four sentinel goddesses and the innermost golden coffin sit on low plinths under controlled light. There is no queue, because the Mus Passes priority-entry lane bypasses the central cashier; there is simply, on arrival, the collection.

A particular pleasure of the new arrangement is the visibility of the minor objects — the boyish-looking fans, the toiletry boxes, the worn shoes that previous installations had relegated to cabinets in corridors. The Grand Egyptian Museum's curators have taken the deliberate view that a royal burial assemblage is a household as well as a treasury, and the galleries present it accordingly.

IV. The conservation laboratories

Uniquely among major museums, the Grand Egyptian has made its conservation laboratories visible to the public. A long glass-walled corridor, running the length of the rear of the building, allows the visitor to observe (without disturbing) conservators working on textiles, pigment, cedarwood, gold leaf and organic material drawn from the reserve collection. The labs are staffed five days a week in working hours; visiting on a Sunday through Thursday morning yields the highest likelihood of seeing the conservators at their tables.

V. Practical strategy

The museum is, quite honestly, a full day. We suggest beginning with the grand staircase as soon as the doors open, proceeding to the Tutankhamun suite second (it is the busiest room in the building), breaking for lunch at the southernmost café (which has the best view of the pyramids), and devoting the afternoon to the thematic galleries on the second floor — Daily Life, Kingship, Beliefs About the Afterlife — which are the most rewarding of the permanent displays and, curiously, the least crowded.

VI. A final note

The Grand Egyptian Museum does not replace the Egyptian Museum at Tahrir Square; the two institutions now complement each other, with Giza holding the Tutankhamun material and a curated display of the royal sequence, and Tahrir retaining the Royal Mummy Hall, the Narmer Palette and the Meidum Geese. A pass-holder with two days in Cairo is best served by a morning at each, separated by an afternoon in Old Cairo at the Coptic and Islamic museums. The city, with a Mus Passes credential, opens.