Rania Habib, on a winter of museum-going.
Arts writer, Heliopolis. Spent the winter walking the new museum on slow afternoons.
My background
I am an arts writer. I grew up in Heliopolis (the north-east Cairo suburb, not the ancient cult-centre, though the suburb takes its name from the cult-centre and is built almost directly on top of the ruins). My degree is in literature from Cairo University. I have, for the last eleven years, written art-and-museums features for a number of Cairo-based and Beirut-based magazines, on a freelance basis. Most of my work is on contemporary Egyptian art, not on antiquities. The GEM is the first time I have written, at length, about a pharaonic museum.
Why this notebook
The Grand Egyptian Museum opened, finally, in November 2025, after twenty-three years of construction. I had been waiting for it as a Cairene — the building has been visible on the road to the pyramids since approximately 2010, slowly accumulating its limestone cladding — and I went, in the second week after opening, for an afternoon. Then I went back. Then I went back four more times. The notebook is what came of the five visits.
What this is not
It is not a guidebook. It does not list opening hours. It does not recommend a route through the museum, or a particular order in which to see the rooms. It does not list practical details — fares, food, where to leave one's bag — though those are easily found elsewhere. It is, as the name says, a notebook: a personal record of what I looked at and what I made of it. The voice is the voice of a private journal, written for myself first and then tidied for the page.
What this is
Five long entries, one for each of my visits, each focused on one part of the museum that I spent that afternoon with. The entries are written long because the museum rewards slow looking; if you have only three hours in the building, this notebook will not be the right reading for you. It is for the second visit, or the fifth.
On the museum itself
The GEM is, in my view as a Cairene of forty, the most important new public building in Egypt in my lifetime. I will not write a verdict on it here — the notebook is a verdict, in the only form I know how to write one — but I will say that, in the small unguarded moments (the colossus in the morning light, the terrace at sunset, the burial-chamber corridor in late afternoon when there are almost no visitors), it is one of the most beautiful museum experiences anywhere.
How to read this
Slowly. The notebook is twelve thousand words long. If you read one entry every other evening, it will see you through a fortnight. That is how I wrote it, and that is, in my view, the right pace at which to read it.
I went, in the second week after opening, for an afternoon. Then I went back. Then I went back four more times. The notebook is what came of the five visits.
— R. H., Heliopolis