The Grand Egyptian Museum is set to open with high hopes

Friday, May 21, 2021

Several exciting archaeological finds at the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo is stimulating hope for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum.

This museum was planned to open in 2015, but building works encountered delays and costs went up from US$500 million to somewhere around the US$1 billion mark.

Once the spectacular 500,000 sqm space opens, none of the previous things will matter.

The museum is located just 2kms from the pyramids. The Grand Egyptian Museum will be world’s largest archaeological museum complex. It will be the home to a collection of 100,000 objects and artefacts, as well as a 3D cinema and a museum for children.

Without paying the appropriate homage to Tutankhamun, the boy-king whose life and death story has enthralled the world since his tomb was discovered by Howard Carter in 1922, no Egyptian museum of this stature would be completed. King Tut’s entire treasure collection will be on display for the first time. Its spread over more than 7,000 sqm of space, featuring 5,400 objects including three coffins and the famous golden funeral mask.

This exhibition will be joined by artifacts from pre-historic times and thousands of years of pharaonic civilization of Egypt through the ancient Greek and Roman periods of Egyptian history.

An 83-ton, 3,200-year-old statue of Ramses II that stood in the middle of a roundabout in Cairo previously was one of the first treasures to be transferred to the museum. Instead of keeping watch over traffic, the enormous depiction of the third pharaoh of the 19th dynasty of Egypt (also known as Ozymandias) now act as a host, welcoming an expected 15,000 people daily from his new position in the museum foyer – that’s more than five million visitors per year.

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• Over 50% of Grand Egyptian Museum’s antiquities inside main exhibition halls