National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC)

NMEC is the museum most visitors have not heard of and the one many leave talking about. It opened fully in April 2021, when twenty-two royal mummies were carried across Cairo from Tahrir in a televised procession, and it tells a single story that no other Egyptian museum attempts: the whole country, from prehistory to the present, in one building.

The Royal Mummies Hall

Down a ramp, deliberately dim and quiet. Each mummy lies alone in a low-lit case with a CT reconstruction, an age at death and a cause where one is known. Ramesses II, Seti I, Hatshepsut, Thutmose III. Photography is forbidden and the rule is enforced, which is why the room stays silent.

• Separate ticket from the main galleries — buy both at the entrance
• Allow an hour for the hall alone; most people slow right down
• The main gallery upstairs runs thematically, not chronologically

Pair it with Coptic Cairo, ten minutes away, rather than with the Grand Egyptian Museum — the two big museums on one day is more than anyone absorbs.

The museum was conceived in the 1980s with UNESCO and spent three decades in construction on a site beside the Ain el-Sira lake in Fustat, the first Islamic capital of Egypt. The location is the argument: Fustat is where the layers of this country are stacked physically, and the building sits on top of them.

The royal mummies came from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir, where they had been displayed since the nineteenth century in conditions no modern conservator would accept. Most were found in two caches — Deir el-Bahari in 1881 and the tomb of Amenhotep II in 1898 — where New Kingdom priests had hidden them from tomb robbers, moving them repeatedly and labelling the wrappings as they went. Those labels are why we know who they are.

The 2021 transfer, staged as the Pharaohs' Golden Parade, was the first time the mummies had moved as a group since the priests did it three thousand years earlier.