Inside the Grand Egyptian Museum: A First Look at the World’s Largest Museum Dedicated to a Single Civilisation

After two decades of anticipation and countless shifting timelines, the Grand Egyptian Museum—GEM to those in the know—is finally nearing its grand reveal. Located just outside Cairo, with the Giza pyramids shimmering in the background like an ancient screensaver, the $1 billion cultural behemoth is poised to become the world’s largest museum dedicated to a single civilization.

Designed by the Irish firm Heneghan Peng, the building itself is a monument—sleek and modern, more Dune than Indiana Jones, with sweeping travertine halls and glass façades that pour golden desert light across every surface. It’s less a museum than an experience—cinematic, immersive, and unapologetically ambitious.

Standing guard at the entrance is a 36-foot-tall granite colossus of Ramses II, relocated from Cairo’s Ramses Square in a painstaking effort that took months of preparation. Inside, over 100,000 artifacts are poised to tell the full story of a civilization that has long fascinated the world. Of these, 20,000 have never been displayed before, making the museum not just a showcase but a revelation.

The undisputed star, however, is Tutankhamun. For the first time ever, the entirety of the boy king’s tomb collection—over 5,000 objects—will be exhibited together. His sandals, his ceremonial bed, his golden coffin, even the linen wrappings used to prepare his body for the afterlife are all here. Some of these pieces were previously scattered in storage or shown only as part of temporary exhibitions. Seeing them unified is as haunting as it is awe-inspiring. It also feels deeply intimate, a glimpse into the personal and political life of a teenager whose death became Egyptology’s most enduring myth.