The GEM, as it is known, has been launched with a cascade of superlatives, the largest this, the finest that, the most expensive … and at £915 million, it certainly comes out towards the top of global museum costs. It has also been the world’s longest-drawn-out tease: 33 years since the initial announcement, 23 years since the foundation stone was laid, 20 years since serious construction began.

Well, there was a global financial crash, a coup, Covid, Gaza … Even after it was finished, there were only partial openings, more announcements and more delays. Finally, on November 4, the museum was fully opened. And November 4, back in 1922, was the day Howard Carter’s workers found steps that led to the tomb of Tutankhamun. I like to think that the museum opening date was not mere coincidence. After all, everything in this building leads you to one very large and spectacular gallery that showcases everything that came out of the young pharaoh’s tomb.

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Inside the museum

The architects, the relatively unknown Dublin-based practice Heneghan Peng, have come up with some inspired touches. It aligned the museum with the three big Giza pyramids, used the elevation of the Giza plateau to give a sense of ascending towards the majesty of Egypt’s past, and clad the main portal with alabaster, a material ancient Egyptians used to such wonderful effects. And yet there are times when the building has all the charm of an airport. One of those is when you walk through that alabaster portal into a space so enormous that it dwarfs the Ozymandian statue of Ramses II, making it seem just another artefact — and an artefact surrounded by food outlets, souvenir and carpet shops and jewellers.

Tutankhamun’s gold burial mask

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The same issue of size struck me in the side building designed specially to house Pharaoh Khufu’s solar boat. This 43m-long boat, found in a pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid, was built out of Lebanese cedarwood, held together with ropes and is seaworthy. It is also an object of sublime beauty, so much so that it wins my vote for one of the wonders of the ancient world. But in its new home it is diminished, its papyrus-shaped prow rising majestically, but then uncomfortably close, towards the ceiling. As for the large sculptures on the grand staircase, they do not strike me as the greatest masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture, and they too are dwarfed by the scale of the building. Then I reached the top of the staircase (there’s an escalator), entered the galleries and oh my …

What to look out for

I have always said that you could take anything out of the old Egyptian Museum, mount and light it properly and it would be reason enough to travel to Cairo. There are thousands of wonders in the new Grand Egyptian Museum. The collection covers the 3,000 years of recorded ancient Egyptian history — and a millennia or so of predynastic. The span of time is dazzling, but don’t let that get in your way. Take it as it comes, and come it will, in the 12 main galleries, whether you are following the chronological route or the other one arranged according to the themes of society, kingship and beliefs.

Artefacts found with Tutankhamun in 1922

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This main part of the museum has been open for over a year now and I have visited at least a dozen times and each time new wonders catch my eye. On my visit this week I was struck, again, by a gilded figure of a man, long and thin, wearing earrings and a penis sheath, dated to the half century before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt (3500-3000BC). How, I wonder, did this art morph so completely into the works we all recognise easily as “Egyptian”? I also noticed for the first time a side room dedicated to Deir el-Medina, the village in Luxor of the workers who dug the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

Much literature has come out of this rare survival of an Egyptian place for the living, but I had not realised that archaeologists had also found such spectacular homely objects, including a tall oil lamp, the stand in wood, the burner in bronze, and a needle and thread, reaching across 3,500 years and still ready to stitch that hole in your linen robe. Other things that stand out in my mind include a wig of human hair (the ancients liked to shave, presumably to deal with lice), a range of ostraca (limestone shards), one painted with a tanned man reaching for a fair-skinned woman, her breasts revealed, and the gold-trimmed bed, chair and jewellery of Hetepheres, mother of the builder of the Great Pyramid.

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The incredible new Tutankhamun galleries

All this pales beside the wonders of the newly opened Tutankhamun galleries. I could spend a day or two here and still not take it all in. For the first time since Howard Carter emptied the tomb, all 5,398 objects are reunited. But the number is not what strikes me and nor is it the amount or value of gold. I know that the 14th century BC is not the high point of ancient Egyptian art, but the quality of the work, the inventiveness, the sheer gobsmacking beauty of just about everything takes the breath away and brings tears to the eyes. It feels good to witness this splendour that reaches across millennia to us, partly I think because so much of it is all too human.

The entire 5,000-piece collection of treasures unearthed with Tutankhamun are now on display

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Here are linen triangles that Tutankhamun wore as underwear, the wreaths of olive, willow and celery, cornflowers and blue lilies placed on his body, here is a reed staff inscribed that “His Majesty selected and cut with his own hands”, and a jar of wine marked “very good shedeh [red wine] of the Estate of Aten in the Western River” and even the name of the vintner, Khay. The way these galleries are laid out, the lighting, the brilliant explanatory panels that manage the difficult trick of being informative without being boring … All that and then the bling, the kilos of gold and the queue to take a selfie with the boy king.
Anthony Sattin was a guest of Abercrombie & Kent, which has five nights’ B&B from £3,595pp, including flights, private transfers, guiding and entry to GEM and other museums (abercrombiekent.com). Sattin’s books on Egypt include The Pharaoh’s Shadow and A Winter on the Nile and he is currently writing Gifts from the Nile. He runs tours to Egypt each spring and autumn (anthonysattin.com)

Egypt’s other gems

The Grand Egptian Museum isn’t the country’s only new treasure — several other museums have opened recently or reopened after facelifts, and each is packed with wonders, writes Anthony Sattin

The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, Cairo

The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization provides an overview of the country’s history

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In 2021 there was a spectacular parade and lightshow to accompany the convoy of royal mummies moved from the Egyptian Museum; even the president turned out to salute the pharaohs. Their new resting place — this museum, overlooking what remains of Fustat, the 7th-century Arab settlement that became Cairo — is a great place to visit on the first or last day of a tour because on one of its floors it provides an overview of Egyptian history. The collection runs from the 3rd millennium BC Old Kingdom and through the New Kingdom to the Greeks, Romans and Christians and the coming of Islam. There are also displays of Bedouin and Nubian life. Highlights include the gilded sarcophagus of Nedjemankh, which was looted in 2011 and sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before being repatriated in 2019; a wreath of golden leaves and a statue of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis; and the contents of the tomb of Sennedjem, brought from Luxor. Perhaps the most extraordinary exhibit is the 14th century BC water clock — a large alabaster bowl with a hole that allows the water to seep out, with indicators marking the passing time; it was probably used to keep track of night-time hours. The mummies transported from the Egyptian Museum — belonging to some of the country’s greatest rulers — are displayed on the lower floor (£9; nmec.gov.eg).

The Egyptian Museum, Cairo

The Narmer Palette inside the Egyptian Museum

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The mother of all museums has graced Tahrir Square since 1902, when daily visitor numbers were in the mere hundreds. It is an old-style storehouse museum, with the ground floor arranged in roughly chronological order, while the upper-floor galleries are more thematic. Now that the treasures of Tutankhamun and others have been moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), most visitors to Cairo will skip this site, which is a shame, as it still houses one of the world’s most important collections of Egyptian antiquities. Ahead as you enter is a gallery of predynastic (before 3100BC) objects, including remarkable ivory stick figures and the Narmer Palette, the ancient “foundation stone” marking the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. Other notable exhibits (though there are many) include the statue and tiled wall from the Step Pyramid of Djoser — the first of its kind in Egypt — and lifesize statues of Prince Rahotep (brother of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid) and his wife, Nofret. Also still here is the amazing sycamore sculpture Sheikh el Balad, Arabic for headman of the village, as is the wooden statue of King Hor I and his ka spirit. Upstairs, the gap left by Tutankhamun has been filled by the treasures of his great-grandparents Yuya and Thuya — when their tomb was opened in 1905 the contents were considered the greatest discovery of the time. Also look for the treasures of Psusennes I — late period, but the gold mask is a marvel (£9; egyptianmuseumcairo.eg).

Imhotep Museum, Giza

The mummy of Pharaoh Merenre I from the 23rd century BC

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Most visitors to Saqqara, the necropolis of the ancient capital Memphis, hurry to see the Step Pyramid and the beautiful Old Kingdom tombs. Before you do that, though, pop into the beautifully curated collection at this museum, just inside the entrance to the site and reopened in December 2023 after years of work following flood damage. If this is your first Egyptian morning, the museum provides a good introduction to Old Kingdom art. Of particular note are fragments from the three and a half miles of tunnels beneath the pyramid, including exquisite stone vessels (there were 40,000 of them) and tiles. There’s also King Merenre I, the oldest known royal mummy (23rd century BC); a carved block showing the effects of a famine; mummified cheese and other food for the afterlife; and the plaster funeral mask of a man called Senu, who lived about four thousand years ago and went out covered in this blaze of colour (included in £10 ticket for Saqqara; Pyramid of Djoser Road).

Graeco-Roman Museum, Alexandria

A collection of Greco-Roman statues on display

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There are many reasons to make the three-hour journey by train or car from Cairo to Alexandria — to visit the historical library, eat seafood and swim in the Med — but seeing the ancient sites has rarely been one of them. For one of the great cities of the classical world, Alexandria has little to show beyond the remains of a theatre, mosaic floors, a pillar here, a catacomb there. There was also a dusty old museum, but it closed in 2005 and reopened in 2023 with a striking lack of fanfare. The much enlarged building is a joy, displaying a world-class collection of Greco-Roman art that is much more interesting than the selection at the GEM. Egypt traded with Greece long before Alexander the Great invaded the country in 332BC, and it is fascinating to see the strength of national identities and the cross-fertilisation of cultures — there are plenty of undeniably Greek and Roman figures, along with pure Egyptian ones. Then there are those who cross the divide, such as the Egyptian goddess Isis, worshipped by Greeks and Romans and shown in a series of striking sculptures. Alexandria is a result of this cross-fertilisation — something that this brilliant museum expresses (£7; Al-Mesallah Sharq).