Egyptian Museum in Tahrir

The Original National Collection, Opened In 1902 And Still Holding On The Order Of A Hundred Thousand Objects After Tutankhamun Went To The Grand Egyptian Museum And The Royal Mummies To The National Museum Of Egyptian Civilization: The Narmer Palette, The Old Kingdom Masterpieces, The Amarna Sculpture, The Tanis Gold And The Fayum Portraits · Cairo, Cairo

The old Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square opened in 1902 and for more than a century held essentially everything: Tutankhamun's gold, the royal mummies, the Old Kingdom masterpieces, all of it crammed into a pink neoclassical building with handwritten labels and no air conditioning. That changed twice. In 2021 the royal mummies moved to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat, and the Tutankhamun collection has gone out to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza. What is left is still, by any ordinary standard, one of the great museums of the world - the Narmer palette, Khafre in diorite, the seated scribe, Rahotep and Nofret, the Amarna colossi of Akhenaten, the Tanis gold, the Fayum portraits and room after room of coffins. It is also still the old museum: dim, dense, dusty and labelled in the nineteenth-century manner, which some visitors find a relief after the new building and others find exhausting.

North side of Tahrir Square in central Cairo, a few minutes from the Nile corniche, Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

Open daily with long daytime hours and, at times, a later closing on some evenings. The building has been under continuous reorganisation since the Grand Egyptian Museum and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization took their share of the collection, so WHAT IS ON SHOW CHANGES and the row deliberately does not list galleries - ask at the desk for a current plan. Large bags go into lockers at the entrance and there are security checks on the way in from the square. Tickets are bought at the gate; the mummy rooms that remain, if any are open, are sometimes ticketed separately. Tahrir Square has a metro station on two lines and the museum is a few minutes' walk from the Nile corniche, which makes this the easiest major site in Cairo to reach.

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