The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) is due to hold its opening ceremony on 1 November, more than 30 years after plans for the museum were first announced. While some of the museum has already been accessible to visitors, the GEM has been waiting to open its crown jewel, the Tutankhamun Gallery, until the official inauguration.
“Preparations are underway to ensure the event reflects the scale and significance of this historic moment,” a government statement said in August. “The opening will be marked by international attendance and special cultural activations, celebrating Egypt’s timeless heritage on a global stage.”
The country has rallied behind the project. “I was someone who wasn’t convinced by the GEM,” says the Egyptian art adviser Mai Eldib. “I was upset about the old museum losing some of its collection, but I am now totally converted. You need a space befitting of the 21st century that addresses this great civilisation of 3,000 years in one structure. To have that under one roof is amazing.”
For ordinary Egyptians and those in the field of Egyptology, the museum’s impact has already been felt. Its contemporary programming has been running for the past two years, with exhibitions, concerts, talks, food festivals and family events, some of which was off site. Puzzles, games and treasure hunts aimed at various demographics have drawn the public to the galleries, which began opening in October last year.
Its conservation labs have been operating since 2010, readying the artefacts on display. A large number of the millennia-old objects were improperly conserved when they were first discovered a century ago, while newly discovered ones have been sent directly to the museum from ongoing digs. Other museums in Egypt have also been using the GEM’s hi-tech equipment when working on objects that were difficult to restore.
“The people were so passionate,” says the researcher Sara Aly, who worked at the museum for four years and is now an Egyptologist in Oxford, working as an assistant researcher at the university’s Griffith Institute. “When we went to transport one statue, there were 22 Egyptologists and restorers accompanying it. And in front of the lorry transporting it, there were two police cars.”
Tutankhamun takes centre stage
Tutankhamun’s tomb was found in an exceptionally pristine state in the Valley of the Kings in 1922 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter, sparking widespread media attention and popular fascination that has not dimmed. The German studio Atelier Brückner designed the Tutankhamun galleries so that two narratives unfold, depending on which direction the visitor travels: that of the king’s life and reign, and going the other way, the story of Carter’s discovery of his tomb. The designers placed the famous gold funerary mask of the boy-king—now encased under 40mm-thick bulletproof glass—near to the entrance, and each story culminates in the tomb itself.
“Tutankhamun was given everything that he might need to live in the afterlife: objects to eat, to hunt with, to sleep,” says Britta Nagel, a partner at Atelier Brückner. “In the museum you come upon the grave, which is a one-to-one reproduction of the scale of his tomb, with projections of the chambers, so you can see how packed it was.”
The GEM is situated among the Giza complex of pyramids, around 45 minutes from central Cairo, and its grand staircase opens immediately onto a view of them. It was first proposed in 1992 by former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, as the century-old Egyptian Museum, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, was unable to cope with the number of tourists. (That museum is still operating, though most of its high-value collection has been moved to the GEM.) And while the GEM is expressly welcoming its local population—tickets are EGP1,270 (£20) for a tourist but drop to EGP200 (£3) for Egyptians—the importance of the tourist sector to the Egyptian economy is immense, and a new airport opened at Giza in 2020 to accommodate the anticipated increase in international visitors.
Delays and crises
The museum has been a massive financial undertaking for Egypt, whose crises have also added to the delays: a severe currency crisis in the past two years as well as a large number of migrants fleeing the conflicts in Gaza and Sudan; before that, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Egyptian Revolution that followed the Arab Spring and the 2008 financial crash.
Most recently, the GEM’s official opening was delayed by four months, after fears that the Iran-Israel War in late June would escalate.
Over the years the cost of the GEM grew to a reported $1bn, with Japan as the largest financial partner. Japan has long links with Egypt and funded the construction of the Cairo Opera House in the 1980s. The Japan International Cooperation Agency, a governmental agency for overseas development, provided two loans in 2008 and 2016, totalling ¥84.2bn (around $800m) for the museum’s construction, according to the agency. As a reflection of this investment, some of the GEM’s wall text is in Japanese as well as Arabic and English.
The museum is now run as a private/public partnership, with the Egyptian company Hassan Allam in charge via its subsidiary, Legacy, and the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities responsible for the artefacts. The ministry appointed the GEM’s director, Ahmed Ghoneim, last October.
- The Grand Egyptian Museum opens to the public on 4 November
