Ancient Egypt Meets the 21st Century at the New Grand Egyptian Museum

When Dutch Egyptologist Huub Pragt found out that he would finally be able to visit the newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) outside of Cairo, it was mid-October and he was some 500 miles south in Aswan, eating breakfast on Elephant Island. “I had been waiting for 20 years!” he says, grinning. He was in Egypt serving as the expert for a small group of Smithsonian Journeys travelers on a 14-day tour. The group had been in Giza just a few days before to visit the Pyramids and the Sphinx. “There were rumblings that it might open soon,” says Smithsonian Journeys traveler Kellie Mecham, but given the constant delays over two decades, “soon” could mean well after the New Year. When the GEM surprised the world by opening for a trial run on October 16, the group had already left Cairo and was preparing to spend three days cruising down the Nile.

Plans for the museum had started out promisingly enough: a worldwide design competition was launched by the Egyptian government in 2002, followed just weeks later by the ceremonial laying of the first foundation stone. An Irish design firm was chosen by 2003, and construction got underway in 2005. And then the world waited as global and local events derailed the ambitious project. First there was the political upheaval of the Arab Spring in 2011, which led to a drawn-out tourism drought. Just as stability and tourists began to return, the pandemic brought the entire world to a halt.

Since 2018, numerous official announcements about the museum’s impending opening have been issued, and every time, the promised timeline came and went. “Every year they would tell us it would open the next year,” says Pragt. A running joke among Egyptians was that the GEM would open “in November” but which year, no one knew.

Smithsonian Journeys has been running trips to Egypt for some 40 years, and for the past five or so, their operators on the ground had been waiting eagerly for the museum to open its doors. When it was clear the opening was imminent, they immediately called their contacts at the museum. By the morning of October 17, the Smithsonian group’s tickets were in hand. A cheer went up in the coach when the guests were told they’d be visiting the GEM on the last day of their trip. “The slogan for the day,” says Pragt, was ‘Thank you Smithsonian!’”

Pragt decided to become an Egyptologist at age 10, while looking up the pyramids in an encyclopedia, and spent much of his career at the Museum of Antiquities in the Dutch city of Leiden. He has visited Egypt numerous times over the years and watched the museum evolve from the outside. Recently, certain galleries briefly allowed limited visitors, and restaurants and gift shops opened at the site. But Pragt chose not to visit until he could experience it all at once. “My expectations were high. And the museum went above them.”

“It’s not for nothing that they call it grand,” he says. Clad in translucent alabaster and glass with triangular motifs incorporated throughout the design, the GEM has been called the “fourth pyramid.” It was built in alignment with the Pyramids of Giza and the effect is intended to be nearly as awe-inspiring as the ancient wonders. The museum, which has cost more than $1 billion, spans about 5,209,000 square feet—the equivalent of 90 football fields—making it the largest archaeological museum in the world. It is flooded with natural light, but one thing Kellie Mecham didn’t expect was the fresh air. “You feel the breeze! It’s open, airy, modern. It really brings Egypt into the 21st century.”

The first thing to greet you when you step inside is a 36-foot, 3,200-year-old statue of Ramses II that once lorded over a busy square near the Cairo train station. All 83 tons of him were carted here upright in a specially designed cage in 2018 and the GEM’s soaring atrium was then built around him. “I don’t think Ramses would appreciate it,” laughs Huub, “but the atrium dwarfs him.”

Beyond Ramses II, the Grand Staircase (and a moving walkway beside it) beckons visitors toward the galleries, with ancient statues and sculptures arranged chronologically on its broad stairs. “It is jaw-dropping,” says Mecham. “I kept walking away and coming back to stare at that staircase. It was so well-designed, the lighting, the technology—how it went up through time. I will remember it for the rest of my life.” And at the top, a breathtaking reward: “a giant window looking out at the pyramids!”

The GEM encompasses 12 galleries covering three themes: society, kingship, and belief, through four time periods stretching from prehistory to the Greco-Roman era. The exhibitions offer insight into the history and lives of the pharaohs, but also of ordinary people in ancient Egypt. Pragt was thrilled to see pieces that had been removed from other museums and kept in storage for years. “I had missed them, and I found them again!” He was particularly happy to rediscover the Old Kingdom jewelry and gilt furniture of Queen Hetepheres, mother of King Khufu who commissioned the building of the Great Pyramid. And Pragt was happy to find a fabulous double statue discovered at Saqqara by Dutch archaeologists. “I still remember where they were standing in the old museum, in a corner, not well lit. Now everything looks new—now they get their moment.”

Most of the GEM’s showcases are freestanding, so you can walk around the objects and look at them from every angle. Their context is explained with the help of 21st-century technology. “They made a wonderful digital representation, not a cartoon, but artistic and very true to the original meaning,” says Pragt. “The stories are told not only by the objects, but with depictions of very famous scenes from the Book of the Dead.” Through virtual reality, hieroglyphs, historical figures, and mythological creatures interact to tell ancient legends and help explain some of the enigmatic themes woven throughout Egyptian art and history.

Mecham was struck by the engineering prowess of the ancient Egyptian, and also by the brilliance of the pigments they used. “In a lot of the tombs, the colors had lost their brightness, especially those exposed to the sun.” The careful lighting of the galleries, however, brings out their radiance. “In paintings of animals, of everyday life—from 3000 BC!—the colors are ridiculously vibrant.”

She also loved the sculpted head of a colossus of Pharaoh Akhenaten, one of the objects perched on the Grand Staircase. “All the other heads sort of looked the same, but this one was elongated with almond eyes. Was it a genetic defect, or a changing way of representing humans? It makes you question why, as a good museum should do.”

Signage was “fabulous,” according to Mecham, but audio guides were not available. Yet other signs of the 21st-century were evident: including a range of restaurants (yes, even Starbucks) and baby changing tables in both men’s and women’s restrooms.

At the moment, the museum is in a “rehearsal” phase, allowing just 4,000 visitors per day to determine how crowds flow through the space and to iron out any issues. Still to come is the museum’s crown jewel: a collection of more than 5,000 artifacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb, which will be displayed in its entirety for the first time ever. While authorities haven’t committed to a date for opening those galleries, the GEM is astonishing even without King Tut. “Everything that Egypt had to go through to get this done, the stick-to-itiveness for 22 years…” says Mecham. “The GEM is here. And it is spectacular.”

“I was happy to go even for just a few hours,” says Pragt. “But you can easily stay a week.”

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Sarah Erdman | READ MORE

Writer / Editor, Smithsonian Journeys