The Great Egyptian Museum (GEM), dedicated to the culture of the pharaohs, is being inaugurated today in Cairo, in a much-hyped event aimed at showcasing the country’s achievements and boosting tourism.
The area around the museum, located near the Giza pyramids, has been cordoned off since morning ahead of the opening ceremony.
About 80 official delegations are expected for the ceremony, of which “40 will be headed by kings, princes, heads of state or government,” among them Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, according to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry.
As a prelude to today’s spectacle, the museum’s colossal facade, located on a hillside overlooking the Giza plateau and its pyramids, has been lit up for the past few nights.
This monumental museum spanning almost half a million square meters and dedicated to the Pharaonic culture, cost more than a billion dollars and required twenty years of titanic works, which Japan supported financially and technically.
A flagship exhibit of the new museum is Tutankhamun’s treasure, discovered in 1922 in an untouched tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt, along with nearly 5,000 of his offerings brought together for the first time in the same space.
In total, the GEM houses more than 100,000 objects, half of which will be on display, making it the world’s largest collection dedicated to a single civilization, which has seen thirty dynasties come and go over more than 5,000 years of history.
When the museum opens to the public on Tuesday, visitors will be greeted in the vast atrium by the museum’s most monumental statue – 83 tons of granite, standing eleven meters tall – representing Ramses II, the pharaoh who ruled Egypt for 66 years more than 3,000 years ago.
GEM features immersive galleries, precision lighting, virtual reality exhibits, and even a children’s museum. Archeology buffs will be able to watch, through a glass window, the conservation workshop’s work to restore a 4,500-year-old “solar boat”, the largest and oldest wooden vessel discovered in Egypt, believed to have been built for Pharaoh Cheops on his journey to the underworld.
Obstacles
After postponements linked to the Arab Spring and then the Covid-19 pandemic, the official opening was set for July 3. But the Egyptian authorities preferred to postpone them at the last minute due to regional tensions in order to give the event “the global scope it deserves”.
After decades of political instability in Egypt, then a series of attacks and finally the 2020 pandemic, Egyptian tourism, crucial to the country’s economy, is recovering: its revenue was $14.4 billion in the fiscal year 2023-2024 (+34.6% compared to the previous fiscal year), while a record number of tourists was recorded after the pandemic.
The country has already welcomed 15 million foreign visitors in the first nine months of this year, a 21% increase over the same period last year, with revenues of $12.5 billion (+14.7%), according to official figures.
Elhamy al-Zayat, former president of the Egyptian Tourism Federation, told AFP the museum is part of a wider plan aimed at transforming the Giza plateau.
“Egypt has created a whole new cultural and tourism zone” on the plateau, with an airport nearby and improved facilities for visitors to the pyramids, he explained.
The roads leading to the plateau have been repaired, a digital ticketing system has been introduced and air-conditioned electric buses now run past the pyramids.
Officials estimate that the GEM alone could attract as many as seven million visitors a year, potentially bringing total visitors to 30 million by 2030.