Egyptian Museum

About Egyptian Museum

Museum in Cairo

The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir, formally the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, is one of the largest and most famous museums in the world, occupying the northern side of Tahrir Square in central Cairo. Its origins go back to 1835, when the Egyptian Antiquities Service was created to curb the looting of ancient sites; the collection was shown first in Azbakiya and then at the Citadel, before the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette opened a museum on the Nile at Boulaq in 1858. After flooding threatened the collection it moved to an annex of the Giza palace, and in 1902, under Khedive Abbas Hilmi II, Gaston Maspero opened the present pink neoclassical building, itself now a Cairo landmark. It was the first national museum in the Middle East and one of the first public museums anywhere. The museum holds more than 170,000 objects spanning every period of ancient Egypt, from the Predynastic era to Graeco-Roman times, among them the treasures of the Middle Kingdom royal tombs at Dahshur found in 1894, colossal royal statues and rich funerary assemblages. Many of its best-known pieces, including the Tutankhamun collection, have been transferred to the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, and the royal mummies moved to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in 2021, yet the remaining collection is still vast and well worth a visit. The museum keeps its old-fashioned character, with two floors of halls densely packed with objects, a charm quite different from the modern museums.

Where:

Cairo, Egypt