The Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, a project nearly 25 years in the making, has finally opened to the public after considerable delays. On November 1, visitors were able to explore all of the museum’s 968,000 square feet of space for the first time.
Plans for the museum were announced in 1992, and construction began in 2002. A dozen of GEM’s main galleries opened to the public in October 2024. The rest were unveiled on Saturday.
The 80,000-square-foot gallery housing all 5,600 burial objects from King Tutankhamun’s tomb is the most highly anticipated space in the new museum. More than half of these objects—among them shrines, coffins, thrones, and chariots—have never been exhibited before. “I had the idea of displaying the complete tomb, which means nothing remains in storage, nothing remains in other museums, and you get to have the complete experience, the way Howard Carter had it over a hundred years ago,” Tarek Tawfik, president of the International Association of Egyptologists told the BBC, referring to Carter, the British Egyptologist who discovered Tutankhamun intact tomb in 1922. (Tawfik is the former director general of GEM.)
Other highlights include a large atrium featuring an 11-foot-tall statue of Ramses II, and a grand staircase lined with statues and objects from a range of Egyptian dynasties. From the top of the staircase, visitors have a view of the pyramids in Giza.
