Grand Egyptian Museum

The Grand Egyptian Museum stands on the desert edge at Giza, angled so that its vast glass facade frames the pyramids two kilometres away. It opened fully in November 2025 after some two decades of construction, and it is now the largest archaeological museum in the world devoted to a single civilisation.

You enter past an eleven-metre colossus of Ramesses II, then climb the Grand Staircase — a six-storey ascent lined with royal statuary, sarcophagi and columns, arranged so the pharaohs seem to accompany you upward. At the top, a wall of glass opens onto the Giza plateau itself.

Don't miss

• The complete Tutankhamun collection — over 5,000 objects shown together for the first time since Carter lifted them out of the tomb
• The hanging obelisk at the entrance, undercut so you can stand beneath it and look up at the pharaoh's cartouche
• The two solar boats of Khufu, including the cedar vessel buried beside the Great Pyramid
• The pyramid view from the panorama windows at the top of the staircase — best in late afternoon

Allow three hours for the highlights and a full day if you want the twelve main galleries. It is comfortably air-conditioned, which makes it a good midday pairing with an early-morning plateau visit.

Egypt had outgrown its old museum long before it admitted it. The building on Tahrir Square, opened in 1902, was designed for a fraction of what it eventually held; by the 1990s objects were stacked in corridors and the majority of the collection had never been on display at all.

The plan for a new museum beside the pyramids was launched in 2002, and the design competition drew more than 1,500 entries from 82 countries — one of the largest in architectural history. It was won by Heneghan Peng, a then-small practice in Dublin. What followed was two decades of revolution, currency collapse and pandemic, each pushing the opening further away.

The move

Transferring the collection became a spectacle in its own right. In 2018 the colossus of Ramesses II was driven across Cairo in a custom cradle. Tutankhamun's objects travelled in climate-controlled convoys under police escort, some of them — the gilded chariots, the great shrines — leaving Tahrir for the first time in a century.

The result reunites a collection that had been split for generations. Carter's excavation catalogued more than 5,000 items from a single small tomb; until now, only a fraction were ever shown at once.