Grand Egyptian Museum

The Grand Egyptian Museum is the largest museum in the world devoted to a single civilisation, and it was built to be seen together with the monuments that inspired it: the site lies about 2 km northwest of the Pyramids of Giza, and its long north and south walls are aligned with the Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Pyramid of Menkaure. The idea surfaced in the early 1990s, when the old Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square was seen as outdated and too small for the collection; construction started in 2005, and after years of delays the museum was formally inaugurated on 1 November 2025, at a cost of about 1.2 billion US dollars.

The building came out of one of the largest architectural competitions ever held, with 1,557 entries from 82 countries. It was won in 2003 by the Irish practice Heneghan Peng, whose design is a chamfered triangle faced with translucent alabaster, set behind a plaza planted with date palms. The exhibition design is by the German studio Atelier Brückner. Inside, a glass-roofed atrium of 10,000 square metres holds the 11-metre, 83-tonne statue of Ramesses II, which stood in Cairo's Ramses Square until it was moved here in 2006. From the atrium the Grand Staircase climbs six storeys past more than 60 pieces of royal and divine sculpture, and at the top an upper terrace looks out towards the pyramids.

Twelve main galleries trace Egypt chronologically from prehistory to the Roman period, with more than 100,000 objects in the collection and some 20,000 on show for the first time. The main event is the Tutankhamun collection: for the first time all 5,398 objects from the boy king's tomb are displayed in one place, in two halls laid out after the plan of his tomb. They include the gold mask, the nested coffins, one of them made of 110 kilograms of solid gold, the gold-and-silver throne showing the king with his wife Ankhesenamun, daggers, bows, beds, chairs and shabti figures. His mummy stays in the Valley of the Kings.

A separate hall is given to the two solar boats of Khufu, around 4,600 years old and among the oldest wooden ships known, and newly restored treasures of Queen Hetepheres, mother of Khufu, and of Yuya and Thuya, parents of Queen Tiye, are on view too.

Getting there

The museum stands in Giza, about 2 km from the pyramids and about 4 km from Kirdasah, beside a motorway interchange; it is reached by road from central Cairo, and the visit pairs naturally with the Giza plateau. Sphinx International Airport (SPX) is about 25 km away.