The Grand Egyptian Museum

Saturday, February 7, 2026

Grand Egyptian Museum

Today we visited the newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum.  Twenty years in the planning, building and filling with treasure, it is an awesome structure.  The entrance is off of a large courtyard: 

In the entrance hall is a 36-foot tall statue of Ramses II, 3200 years old.  It is incredible.  Look at the people behind for a sense of scale: 

The array of ancient Egyptian artifacts is exhaustive, and I can’t possibly give a sense of the enormity or magnificence of it all.  Here are King Ptolemy II and his Queen, Arsinoe II: 

There is a separate building which houses the Khufu boat which was found adjacent to the Great Pyramid.  The boat was probably never in any water; it’s function was to carry the soul of Khufu into the afterlife.  Again, look at the people for a sense of scale. 

The original ropes and knotting are exhibited: 

There are many galleries, and we had time only of a couple.  Here are troops of spearmen from the 11th Dynasty: 

One very large gallery is completely filled with over 5000 artifacts from the tomb of King Tut.  Astonishingly, Tut was a minor king, and the remarkable treasures found in his tomb were there because the entrance to it was well hidden.  Just about all the tombs of other pharaohs had been robbed; if Tut’s tomb had such magnificent treasure, it is almost unimaginable to consider what’s missing from the tombs which were vandalized.  Here are the chariots which were in King Tutankhamon’s tomb:

Tut was buried in a triple coffin, the outer two were gold coated wood, the innermost was solid gold.  Here’s the outermost coffin: 

And the inner one: 

And the very famous gold death mask: 

The museum has to be seen to be comprehended.  It is truly one of the great museums of the world.  We spent the morning and early afternoon there and had lunch at one of the museum restaurants.  We then drove to the airport for our evening flight to Luxor where we checked into the hotel and collapsed!  More when I can.

Comments

  1. MarciaFebruary 10, 2026 at 12:18 PM

    Hope I am able to see pic some day!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ralph P. LockeFebruary 11, 2026 at 2:18 AM

    I am utterly stunned. I saw some of the King Tut exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when I was in high school. But that traveling exhibition gave little sense of the quantity of items, and I'm sure didn't have any of the super-large ones. Nor did it explain (as I recall) that Tut was a relatively minor king. The statues of the dozens of spear-carriers, though, do remind me of a display that I saw two decades later in that same Boston museum: minuscule 3-dimensional replicas of the rooms of an Egyptian palace, filled with storage containers, wash bins, etc.--and all of this was itself an artifact of the period (found in a tomb)--though they could be easily mistaken for a modern "reenactment" of what an ancient Egyptian palace interior looked like. The whole attempt at glorifying the rulers is of course very resonant for us today (and reminds me of Shelley's devastating poem Ozymandias--asking what happened to the regime that mandated all this immense display--https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias). But it is also a tribute to the human impulse to create beauty and majesty--out of the inert materials that this Earth provides....

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