Egyptian Museum

The oldest purpose-built archaeological museum in the region, standing on Tahrir Square since 1902 — a salmon-pink neoclassical building whose galleries are themselves part of the experience: high skylights, wooden vitrines, handwritten labels among the new ones, and objects arranged with a density no modern museum would attempt.

Its two most famous holdings have moved. Tutankhamun's treasures went to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, and the royal mummies to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. What remains is still one of the great collections on earth — over a hundred and seventy thousand objects — and the crowds are a fraction of what they were.

What to seek out now

• The Narmer Palette — the object on which Egypt's unification is first recorded, and arguably the beginning of Egyptian history
• Old Kingdom masterpieces: the seated Khafre in diorite, the Menkaure triads, Rahotep and Nofret with their inlaid eyes, and the Seated Scribe
• The Tanis treasure — gold and silver from an intact royal burial in the Delta, including the silver falcon-headed coffin of Psusennes I
• The Amarna rooms — the elongated, unsettling colossi of Akhenaten
• Yuya and Thuya, Tutankhamun's likely great-grandparents, whose near-intact burial was the richest found before 1922

The museum exists because Egypt's antiquities were leaving. Through the 19th century, consuls and collectors shipped objects abroad by the boatload; Auguste Mariette, appointed to run the new Antiquities Service in 1858, set out to stop it by giving the finds somewhere to stay. His collection moved through Bulaq and Giza before this building was completed in 1902, designed by the French architect Marcel Dourgnon. Mariette is buried in the garden, in a sarcophagus beside the entrance.

The Golden Parade

In April 2021 twenty-two royal mummies — eighteen kings and four queens, among them Ramesses II, Seti I and Hatshepsut — were moved to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat. Rather than move them quietly, Egypt staged a televised night-time procession through Cairo: each mummy in a nitrogen-filled case on a decorated vehicle, in chronological order of reign, along roads resurfaced to keep the ride smooth, with a 21-gun salute.

What it becomes next

Losing its headline attractions has forced a reinvention, and the museum is being rehung around themes rather than around Tutankhamun. For many visitors the result is a better one: the Old Kingdom rooms in particular can now be seen properly, which for a century was almost impossible.