The Grand Egyptian Museum, the result of almost two decades of planning, will finally be inaugurated this year. Located in Cairo, once open the new art institution will be the largest archaeological museum complex in the world, with no less than 100,000 historic artifacts including the entirety of King Tut’s treasure collection and various prehistoric objects tracing the fascinating history of Egypt.
Irish firm Heneghan Peng Architects is heading up the design of the monumental museum, which is located nearby the Pyramids of Giza and will have its own impressive facade with a massive entrance that looks like it’s made up of several glowing angular panels featuring hieroglyphs representing the names of kings and queens throughout Egyptian history.
The museum’s immense footprint could only be located in such a vast desert, given the scale clocks in at a massive 483,095 square metres, which translates to just under 120 acres. To put that into perspective, that’s about 90 regular-sized football fields.
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The Egyptian government is expecting the Grand Egyptian Museum to welcome around 15,000 visitors per day. That’s five million guests per year, which is about half of the current annual visitation record (10.2 million) set by The Louvre in 2018.
A large team of conservationists and archaeologists have been working around the clock to restore and re-examine many of these artifacts, some of which were previously showcased in the 117-year-old Egyptian Museum. In a way, you could consider the Grand Egyptian Museum a follow-up to what is currently one of the country’s most important cultural institutions, located in central Cairo’s Tahrir square.
According to CNN, the Grand Egyptian Museum will be powered by one of the world’s largest conservation centres, with around 17 labs dedicated to telling the story of a civilization with thousands of years to preserve.
“This will be a museum of the 21st century,” stated Director General Tarek Tawfik when talking with CNN.
“All means of modern technology have been taken into consideration in order to make this an unforgettable experience for the visitor, but at the same time provide the best possible environment for the artifacts.”
In addition to permanent features like a giant 3,200-year-old statue of Ramses II at the entrance and more than 100,000 antiquities, the Grand Egyptian Museum will host regular special exhibitions. The opening one will be the aforementioned display of King Tutankhamun’s valuables, with about 5,000 objects on show for the very first time since they were discovered in 1922.
The Grand Egyptian Museum has been an investment of around US$1 billion (~AU$1.5 billion) for the Egyptian government, which is twice the original cost owing the numerous setbacks including financial problems, environmental issues, political unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic.
