Egyptian Museum

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Egyptian Museum in Cairo houses more than 170,000 artifacts, yet when a visitor once pointed out that the building looked less like a museum and more like a storage facility, director Gaston Maspero had a ready answer. He said it was simply following the tradition of a pharaonic tomb or temple, where every inch of wall was covered in paintings and hieroglyphic inscriptions. That comparison, half-serious and half-defiant, captures something essential about this institution. What draws people from around the world to Tahrir Square is not just the scale of the collection but the friction of it: ancient objects crammed so densely that the building itself becomes an experience. How did one of Africa's largest museums come to exist on that particular square? Who saved these objects when they were being donated away to European royalty, and who lost them to thieves? And what does it mean that the building opened in 1902 and is still, well over a century later, running out of room?

• 2. A Collection in Danger

  ›

  The Egyptian government established a museum in 1835 near the Ezbekieh Garden, but the collection's early decades were marked by disorder and political misfortune. Youssef Diaa Effendi, the Director of the Antiquities Department, worked to survey artifacts uncovered by farmers across Middle Egypt, yet the institution lacked protection from the highest levels. Muhammad Ali Pasha assigned the Minister of Education, Linan Bek, to compile a report on archaeological sites and route finds to the museum in 1848, but Ali Pasha died the following year, and the project collapsed. The trade in antiquities resurfaced, the Ezbekieh collection shrank, and what remained was moved to a single hall in the Cairo Citadel. In 1855 the situation reached its lowest point. Khedive Abbas I gave the entire contents of that hall to Archduke Maximilian of Austria during a visit to the citadel. Those objects are now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The loss was a turning point. Auguste Mariette, who had come to Egypt on an expedition and stayed to transform its approach to heritage, founded a new Antiquities Department and opened a replacement museum in 1858 at Boulaq, a former warehouse on the bank of the Nile. Mariette viewed Boulaq as a temporary arrangement from the start, and a Nile flood in 1878 that damaged the building proved him right. He advocated for a permanent structure set back from the floodplain, but he did not live to see it built. His successor, Gaston Maspero, tried and failed to relocate the collection from Boulaq. By 1889 the building was completely full, with no exhibition space and no storage left. Artifacts recovered from excavations sat for long periods on boats in Upper Egypt, waiting for somewhere to go. Khedive Ismail stepped in, offering one of his palaces in Giza, on land that is now the city zoo, as an interim solution. Everything from Boulaq was transferred there by the end of 1889 and reorganized by the scholar De Morgan, who served as director at that time.

• 3. Building on Tahrir Square

  ›

  The foundation stone for a permanent museum was laid on the 1st of April 1897, in the presence of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II, his Prime Minister, and the full cabinet. The French architect Marcel Dournon had designed the building the same year, positioning it on the northern edge of what was then called Ismailia Square, alongside British Army barracks near Qasr El-Nil. Dournon's design was carried through to completion by the German architect Hermann Grabe, and the construction itself was handled by the Italian company of Giuseppe Garozzo and Francesco Zaffrani. The project was physically ready by March 1902, when the Italian architect Alessandro Parazenti received the keys. Moving the collection from Khedive Ismail's Giza palace to the new building was an operation of considerable scale. Five thousand wooden carts were used for most of the objects. Large pieces traveled by two trains making roughly nineteen return trips between Giza and Qasr El-Nil. The very first shipment consisted of approximately forty-eight stone coffins, weighing more than a thousand tons combined. The transfer finished on the 13th of July 1902. In keeping with a wish he had expressed during his lifetime, Auguste Mariette's tomb was moved to the museum's garden, placing him permanently among the antiquities he had spent decades collecting. The Egyptian Museum opened officially on the 15th of November 1902. The exhibition approach it adopted organized large statues on the ground floor for structural reasons, while funerary items were arranged chronologically on the floor above. From day one, new acquisitions continued arriving and being arranged by theme. The result was a building so full that, as Maspero's comparison suggested, the density itself became part of the character of the place.

• 4. Revolution and Its Aftermath

  ›

  On the 28th of January 2011, the Egyptian Museum was broken into during the security turmoil that followed the outbreak of the 25th of January Revolution. Unidentified individuals entered the building and stole 54 artifacts. Zahi Hawass, then director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, responded publicly: "My heart is broken and my blood is boiling." Hawass later described how thieves seeking gold broke 70 objects, including two sculptures of Tutankhamun, and removed two skulls from a research laboratory before being intercepted. The military cordoned off the museum to prevent further looting. The break-in also drew reports of human rights abuses. Activists, witnesses, and videos documented claims that the museum was used as a detention and torture site during that period, with people allegedly subjected to electric shocks, whips, and wires, and women allegedly tied to fences and trees. Singer and activist Ramy Essam was among those reportedly detained and tortured there. Two mummies were destroyed in the chaos, a third was damaged by fire, and several other objects were harmed. Of the 54 stolen items, 25 were recovered relatively quickly on the museum grounds. The recovered objects, which included two gold-covered cedar-wood statues of Tutankhamun, a statue of King Akhenaten, Ushabti figures belonging to Nubian kings, an unwrapped child mummy, and a small polychrome glass vase, were displayed in September 2013 in an exhibition called "Damaged and Restored." Among the recovered pieces were six of the seven Ushabtis of Yuya; a seventh statuette was found in 2014, but one shabti from that set remains unaccounted for. A separate theft became public in August 2004, before the revolution, when 38 artifacts were reported missing and the matter was referred to public prosecution. Then in September 2025, a 3,000-year-old gold bracelet from the reign of King Amenemope was reported stolen. A restoration specialist was among four people subsequently arrested; the specialist confessed to removing it from a museum safe and selling it through a chain of jewellers before it reached a gold foundry worker who melted it down.

• 5. What the Walls Hold

  ›

  The ground floor runs clockwise from the pre-dynastic era through to the Greco-Roman period, with its largest objects: stone statues, reliefs, and architectural elements. Among them are the Narmer Palette and the statue of Khasekhemwy from the Early Dynastic period, as well as statues of Djoser, Khafre, Menkaure, and the courtier figure known as Sheikh El-Balad from the Old Kingdom. The New Kingdom material, spanning the period from 1550 to 1069 BC, occupies a significant portion of the ground floor, including statues, tables, and sarcophagi. The upper floor shifts in scale and texture. Coins made from gold, silver, and bronze are held there, and they are not only Egyptian: Greek, Roman, and Islamic coinage has helped historians trace the patterns of ancient trade. Papyri survive in generally small fragments, the result of two thousand years of decay, and they carry text in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and ancient Egyptian. The Tutankhamun collection had long occupied a prominent place on the upper floor, and artifacts from the intact tombs of Tutankhamun and Psusennes I were accessible there alongside material from the Valley of the Kings. The Late Period holdings include the treasures of Tanis, gold and silver objects recovered from the tombs of 21st and 22nd dynasty kings and queens, along with the funerary masks of Psusennes I, Amenemope, and Shoshenq II. The Roman Period section contains the Dush Treasure, which was discovered in 1989. Until 2021, two rooms held royal mummies from the New Kingdom. On the 3rd of April 2021, twenty-two of those mummies, eighteen kings and four queens, were transported to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat in the event known as the Pharaohs' Golden Parade, with roads near both museums closed and placed under heavy security.

• 6. Restoration and the Library

  ›

  In 1983, the museum building was registered as a heritage site on account of its architectural value. By the early 2000s, decades of pollution and heavy traffic had obscured much of the building's original appearance. The Ministry of Antiquities launched a rehabilitation plan in May 2012, with the German Foreign Ministry funding the necessary research and the International Environmental Quality Association participating in implementation. The first phase involved identifying the building's original paint colors, restoring wall surfaces and column decorations, replacing window glass with UV-protective panes to protect the artifacts, and reactivating the original ventilation system. Restoration teams worked from 257 preserved design panels held in the museum's own library. A major renovation had already begun in August 2006, adding a cultural center and an administrative-commercial annex on the western side. The full restoration project was completed in 2016 after addressing the eastern and northern wings, lighting deficiencies, and the arrangement of displays. In July 2016, the internal and external lighting systems were upgraded to allow nighttime visits. The final phase was inaugurated in November 2018, bringing a new exhibition layout, moving the collections of Yuya and Thuya to the upper floor, and concentrating Tutankhamun's artifacts in one place until they can be transferred to the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. A committee of directors from the museums of Turin, the Louvre, United Museums, and Berlin oversaw how the artifacts were redistributed. The museum's library opened alongside the building in 1902 and received an allocated budget for book purchases from 1899 onward. Maspero championed a permanent acquisitions budget and appointed Dacros as the first librarian, a post held from 1903 to 1906. The library grew over the following decades through successive directors, with Diaa El-Din Abu Ghazi, who became head librarian in 1950, expanding its holdings and international exchanges. It now spans two floors, contains two reading rooms, and holds more than 50,000 books and volumes, including rare works on ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern archaeology, as well as notable holdings such as Description de l'Egypte and the works of Lepsius.

• 7. Leadership and Legacy

  ›

  Auguste Mariette served as the museum's first director from 1858 to 1881, a tenure that shaped the institution's identity. His tomb, relocated to the garden in 1902, stands alongside a monument surrounded by 24 busts of celebrated Egyptologists, including Jean-Francois Champollion, Karl Richard Lepsius, and Ippolito Rosellini, among others. In 2004, the museum appointed Wafaa El Saddik as its first female director general, a milestone in an institution that had been led almost exclusively by European scholars for its first century. The museum currently holds 42 rooms and is considered one of the largest museums in Africa and the first national museum of the Middle East. Overcrowding has been part of its story since the day it opened: the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza was conceived partly in response to the criticism that the Tahrir Square building made visiting cumbersome due to the density of its displays. The sale room operated by the Department of Antiquities in room 56 on the ground floor, which sold original artifacts from 1902 onward and allowed dealers to bring objects for inspection and export clearance every Thursday until the 1970s, closed in November 1979 after years of internal debate. Many objects now held in private and public collections worldwide passed through that room. The bracelet melted down after the 2025 theft, once part of a royal burial from the reign of King Amenemope, is among those losses that cannot be undone.