What are the world’s greatest museums?
Most of us instinctively turn to the familiar titans: the British Museum, the Louvre, the Smithsonian, MoMA, the Forbidden City, the Rijksmuseum, the Hermitage, the Uffizi, the Vatican.
Having just been there, the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) merits inclusion.
The GEM arrives with a remarkable set of superlatives:
• The largest museum devoted to a single civilisation
• The second-largest museum in the world after the Louvre
• At $1.2 billion, the most expensive museum ever built
Yet these statistics barely hint at the scale of what may be Egypt’s most ambitious cultural project since the construction of the Pyramids of Giza.
Construction began in 2005, paused during the Arab Spring and was delayed again by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the end, the GEM took almost as long to complete as the Great Pyramid itself, finally officially opening in November 2025.
Within its vast 500,000-square-metre footprint, roughly 70 football pitches, the museum holds an estimated 100,000 artefacts, including 20,000 being displayed for the first time.
Architecturally, the GEM is extraordinary. Stepping inside its facade of alabaster, glass and hieroglyphic triangles, I am greeted by a 3,200-year-old, 36-foot statue of Ramesses II. A monumental staircase ascends between rows of ancient kings and queens, rising to upper galleries where a vast window reveals a perfectly framed view of the Giza plateau.
I move through 12 chronologically arranged galleries, tracing Egypt’s story from its pre-dynastic beginnings through the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms and into the Roman era. Thematic pathways deepen the journey, exploring daily life, belief systems, craftsmanship and ritual.
I learn that mummification lasted 70 days, its timing linked to the stars. The process coincided with the annual disappearance of Sirius, whose absence from the night sky also spanned 70 days. When Sirius reappeared, it signalled renewal and the start of a new year, mirroring the deceased’s own passage through the underworld toward rebirth.
I learn that the journey from burial to resurrection unfolded over 12 symbolic hours. The sun god Ra travelled through the Duat each night for 12 hours aboard the Meseket, his night boat, moving from the western horizon at dusk to the eastern horizon at dawn. The dead were believed to follow a parallel path, navigating the same perils and undergoing judgement, most notably the weighing of the heart against the feather of Ma’at.
To aid them, the deceased were equipped with the Chapters of Going Forth by Day, a guidebook for navigating the Duat and reaching resurrection. The ancient Egyptians understood their craft in depth: incense burned within tombs created a protective vacuum, which is why some of the wooden objects on display have survived for 4,500 years.
Like the Egyptian conception of death, the museum itself is both theatrical and meticulously choreographed.
Despite the crowds, the gallery achieves exactly that: pure awe. I could spend a day or two here and still absorb only a fraction of what it holds.
What strikes me most is not the quantity of objects, nor the amount of gold, but the artistry. The quality and beauty of the work are breathtaking, from the 365 shabtis, each a tiny mummiform guardian, to the exquisite jewellery of unimaginable delicacy.
It is a privilege not only to witness splendour that has survived across millennia, but also to glimpse the texture of an ancient world. The six chariots buried with a minor king who ruled for just nine years prompt an irresistible question: how many must have accompanied a pharaoh as powerful as Ramesses II?
There are games of Senet, an ancient Egyptian board game for two players, alongside bows, arrows, boomerangs (yes, boomerangs) and shabtis trimmed with leopard skin. Yet it is the human detail that lingers most: the fine linen gloves, the triangular loincloths that served as undergarments and the walking sticks placed beside a young king who was believed to be ill and suffering from a club foot.
The museum’s layout offers a wonderfully immersive sense of what Howard Carter must have felt as he uncovered Tutankhamun’s burial chamber. Like opening a vast pharaonic Matryoshka doll, the tomb revealed four gilded shrines and three nested coffins encased within a stone sarcophagus. The innermost coffin, a solid-gold masterpiece, held the mummy itself, adorned with the golden burial mask that has become one of the most recognisable objects in human history.
I walk in awe past the sequence of shrines and coffins: the towering outer shrine, three metres high and five metres in length, then the outer middle, inner middle and inner shrines; the sarcophagus; the outer and middle coffins; and finally the solid-gold inner coffin, weighing more than 110 kilograms. At the end of this progression gleams the iconic golden mask.
The splendour of the burial mask is riveting, although officious stewards do not let those wanting a selfie in front of it linger too long. But it is again the human side that moves me. As a product of interbreeding, Tutankhamun may have inherited a cleft palate. It is the vulnerability of this boy king.
The centrepiece of the museum is the complete Tutankhamun collection: 5,398 artefacts displayed together for the first time in a vast 7,500-square-metre space dedicated entirely to the Boy King. For the first time since Howard Carter’s discovery in 1922, all the “wonderful things” he unearthed are reunited in a single exhibition designed to evoke the same sense of astonishment Carter felt upon opening the tomb.
Find out more about Egypt with Steppes Travel.
