A working notebook on the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza — the new national museum that opened, after twenty-three years of construction, in November 2025. Five days of looking, slowly, at the rooms.
Each entry is what I wrote in the small black notebook I carry to the GEM — sometimes that afternoon at a café in Maadi, sometimes on the metro back from Giza. They are first impressions, not academic readings.
My first afternoon in the museum was spent almost entirely in the atrium, looking at the eleven-metre standing statue of Ramesses II that the architects have placed at the foot of the Grand Staircase. The colossus is the museum's first proper room, in a sense — the room you cross before any other room.
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The Grand Staircase climbs six storeys from the atrium to the gallery floor, with eighty-seven sculptures placed along its length in a slow chronological sweep from the Old Kingdom to the late Ptolemaic. The light, in mid-winter, comes through the alabaster screen at the top.
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The Tutankhamun galleries occupy two long halls on the upper floor of the museum and hold, for the first time anywhere, the entire holding of the tomb of Tutankhamun — 5,398 catalogued objects, of which 4,500 are on display. I spent a third visit in the first half of the suite, from the antechamber finds to the burial chamber.
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A fourth visit, on a cold morning, to the second half of the Tutankhamun suite — the chariots, the bows, the camp beds, the boats, the alabaster vessels, and finally the gold mask in its small darkened room at the end of the gallery.
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On my last visit I went up to the external terrace at the back of the main hall, which looks directly across the Giza plateau at the Great Pyramid two kilometres away, and stood there for half an hour while the late-afternoon sun moved across the limestone. The museum's most important exhibit is the view from its own back door.
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Freelance arts writer, Heliopolis. Spent the winter visiting the GEM five times in five weeks. The notebook is what came of it. More on the project →