Grand Egyptian Museum

The Grand Egyptian Museum, known as the GEM, stands on the edge of the Giza plateau, about two kilometres from the Pyramids of Giza. It is the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single civilisation and is run by Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The building was designed by the Irish firm Heneghan Peng Architects after an international competition, and construction started in the 2000s. Parts of the museum opened to visitors in stages from 2023, and the full official opening took place in November 2025.

Visitors enter a large atrium dominated by an 11-metre statue of Ramesses II, moved here from central Cairo in 2018. The Grand Staircase is lined with statues of kings and gods and ends at a window framing the pyramids. The main galleries trace Egyptian history from prehistory to the Roman period.

The Tutankhamun galleries show the full contents of his tomb together for the first time, including the gold mask, chariots and shrines. The museum also displays the reconstructed solar boat of Khufu. Tickets are dated and can be bought online. Foreign and Egyptian visitors pay different rates, and prices were raised on 1 November, so check the official site, visit-gem.com, for current prices.

Scale is the first thing to plan around. The building has a floor area of about 81,000 square metres, the museum holds more than 100,000 objects and displays over 24,000 of them in 12 galleries. The Tutankhamun collection alone counts 5,398 objects, shown in two halls of about 7,000 square metres.

The design came from a competition announced on 7 January 2002 that drew 1,557 entries from 82 countries, won by Róisín Heneghan and Shih-Fu Peng. The project cost about $1.2 billion. The Ramesses II statue in the atrium weighs about 83 tonnes, and the Grand Staircase rises six storeys, around 50 metres, past more than 60 large pieces. Khufu's boat was moved here from the old Solar Boat Museum beside the Great Pyramid in August 2021. Behind the galleries, a conservation centre with 19 laboratories is linked to the museum by a tunnel of about 200 metres. The official opening on 1 November 2025 followed a trial opening in October 2024.