The Grand Egyptian Museum

The Grand Egyptian Museum will be open soon

The Grand Egyptian Museum, located on the edge of the Giza Plateau in Egypt, is expected to open its doors to the public this summer. Designed by Ireland’s Heneghan Peng Architects, the museum is located just two kilometers from Egypt’s iconic pyramids. The Grand Egyptian Museum, the world’s largest single civilization museum, will showcase nearly 100,000 ancient Egyptian artifacts. The entire museum complex will include a 24,000 square meter permanent exhibition hall, a conservation center, a children’s museum, educational exhibits, conference areas, and landscaped gardens.

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In 2003, Heneghan Peng Architects won the first prize in an international design competition organized by the Egyptian government. As a mega-museum project, the design team involved a total of 300 people from 13 firms in 6 countries. BuroHappold Engineering (Ireland) and Arup (UK) were responsible for the engineering design, Atelier Brueckner (Germany) was responsible for the design of the Tutankhamun gallery, central plaza, and children’s museum and West 8 was responsible for the overall landscape planning of the project.

The 500,000-square-meter site is located at the intersection of the Nile floodplain and the Giza plateau, with an elevation difference of nearly 50 meters between the two topographies.

Heneghan Peng Architects took advantage of the site’s unique height difference to design the museum as a highly “layered” space, allowing visitors to have a richer viewing experience. Before entering the museum, visitors will pass through a memorial plaza, followed by a sheltered entrance area. After climbing a large flight of steps, visitors will enter the museum’s exhibition area on a higher level. From this area, visitors can look out over the majestic pyramids in the distance. The entire building is radial in shape, with these radial axes extending exactly two kilometers away to the three pyramids. The museum’s façade is a modern and monumental collage of translucent giant slabs, offering visitors a unique experience of light and shadow.

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According to the museum arrangement, the exhibition will present for the 1st time all kinds of representative artifacts of Tutankhamun. 1922, the British Howard Carter accidentally discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb and excavated 5398 precious accompanying objects, and after the museum count, the total number was updated to 5600 pieces. In addition to all kinds of gold items, the visit also allows you to see more everyday objects, such as the Pharaoh’s cane, the loincloth used to cover his shame, back darts, and the food box where coriander seeds and juniper berries were stored.

The Griffith Institute at Oxford University, a center for Egyptology and ancient Near Eastern studies, holds a collection of Howard Carter’s archives. The Institute will make available 100 electronic scans of photographs of Tutankhamun’s excavations taken by Harry Burton (Harry Burton).

Egypt’s most prominent Egyptologist, Zahi Hawass, said the Grand Egyptian Museum will be “the largest museum in the world. Hawass said in an interview, the Egyptian Museum from Cairo to the new museum, the original Tutankhamun gold mask and other popular artifacts will be replaced, plans to display 20 royal mummies, the ancient Egyptian city of Tanis artifacts and World War II French archaeologist Pierre Montet (Pierre Montet) in the Nile Delta royal tombs found in the gold burial artifacts.

There is no doubt that the Grand Egyptian Museum is of great importance to Egypt. Muftah said President Sisi wanted the building to be “perfect” and for that reason, they meet every month, sometimes weekly. Egypt’s economy needs tourists to come, and the Muftah expects the number of visitors in the first year of opening to be 2-3 million. With a long-term goal of 8 million people per year, the museum has more than enough space.

A coincidence is that archaeologists estimate that it took Pharaoh Khufu about 20 years to build the Great Pyramid. The Grand Egyptian Museum, now also in Giza, also took about 20 years from the announcement of the building proposal bid in 2002 to its expected opening in 2021. If the opening date is postponed again, 2022 will mark the 100th anniversary of Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.