The Egyptian Museum, Cairo

More than 160,000 objects by the museum's own count, spanning the Predynastic period to the Roman, in a building with just over 100 display halls and a basement store holding everything not on show. The ministry still calls it the largest collection of Pharaonic antiquities in the world and the oldest archaeological museum in the Middle East. Its irreplaceable strengths after the transfers of 2021 and 2025 are the Old Kingdom, where the statues of the three Giza pyramid-builders stand; Amarna, where the colossal Akhenaten pillar statues are; the Tanis royal burials, above all Psusennes I; the complete non-royal burial of Yuya and Thuya; the Narmer Palette at the very beginning of the record; and the papyri, coffins and jewellery in bulk. What it no longer holds is the Tutankhamun material and the royal mummies. A reader planning a visit needs both halves of that sentence.

The Egyptian government held an international competition for the design in 1895 - the ministry describes it as the first of its kind - and it was won by the French architect Marcel Dourgnon. Work began in 1897 and the museum opened on 15 November 1902, inaugurated by Khedive Abbas Helmy II, whose name is on the Latin dedication cut into the entablature over the door. The museum's own claim about itself is worth quoting in full because it is the sort of claim that usually turns out to be inflated and here appears not to be: the government decided to build it in the heart of Cairo to be the first building in the world built specifically to serve as a museum.

What Dourgnon built is a European neoclassical shell to hold Egyptian antiquity, and it does not pretend otherwise: fluted pilasters, Greek-key friezes, painted rosettes, a domed rotunda behind the entrance, glazed light courts over an arcaded upper gallery. All of that glazing is the point. This is 1902, before dependable artificial gallery lighting, so the plan is a device for bringing the Cairo sun down onto stone without bringing the Cairo heat with it. The building is pink, free-standing, and set back behind a garden that doubles as an open-air lapidarium, with a lily pond on the axis and stelae and small sphinxes out on the grass.

The internal logic is simple and has not changed. The ground floor runs in chronological order, from the Predynastic material round to the Greco-Roman. The upper floor is arranged by category and by collection instead - papyri here, models there, jewellery, coffins, the burial groups kept together. More than 100 display halls across the two floors. And then the sentence on the museum's own visit page that tells a reader what kind of institution this really is: there is also a large basement used to store objects that have not been put on display. With more than 160,000 objects and a hundred-odd halls, the store is not an annexe to this museum. It is most of it.

This is the fact a visitor needs and the hardest one to find, because almost every secondary account of this museum was written before it stopped being true. Over five years the Egyptian state moved the two most famous holdings out of Tahrir Square and into two new museums.

The first move was the royal mummies. The museum's own listing for the Pharaohs' Golden Parade, dated 3 April 2021, describes a solemn procession transporting twenty-two royal mummies of the kings and queens of Egypt out of the Egyptian Museum, and its announcement of the previous day said Tahrir would close its doors temporarily for the event. The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization at Fustat now lists a Royal Mummies Gallery among its own exhibits. Those two institutional statements are what we have; between them they establish that the royal mummies left Tahrir for Fustat in April 2021. The parade announcement is also, five years later, still the most recent item on the Tahrir museum's news feed.

The second move was Tutankhamun. On 12 September 2025 Ahram Online reported that the Tahrir museum would close its Tutankhamun Gallery from 20 October 2025 so that the last of the boy king's treasures could be transferred to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, which opened on 1 November and reopened after a short closure on 4 November, the 103rd anniversary of Howard Carter's discovery. The whole collection, more than 5,000 objects, is now displayed together in a single hall at Giza for the first time since it came out of the ground. The ministry had already been reporting the transfers in batches - 163 pieces in one consignment, including the ceremonial chair and the gilded canopic compartment, moved from Tahrir to their permanent location at Giza. Mohamed Ismail Khaled, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, was quoted saying that the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir would remain open to the public as usual, with only the Tutankhamun Gallery affected by the closure.

So what is still here? The ministry's own current page for the museum answers that question by what it chooses to name: the complete burials of Yuya and Thuya; Psusennes I and the treasures of Tanis; the Narmer Palette; the statues of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure; and an extensive collection of papyri, sarcophagi and jewellery. The Amarna gallery, with its colossal Akhenaten pillar statues, has never been part of either transfer. What no authority has published is an object-by-object list of what stayed and what went, and we are not going to invent one. Where the record is thin - the coffins from the royal cachettes, whose mummies went to Fustat - we say so in the open questions rather than imply an answer.

The honest way to put the whole thing: Tahrir has lost the two collections that made it famous and kept the collection that makes it important.

This archive holds a record of the gilded coffin of Nedjemankh, the object the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought in July 2017 for 3.5 million euros on a forged 1971 Egyptian export licence and surrendered to Egypt in 2019 after the Manhattan District Attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit established that it had been looted from the Minya region in 2011. Because that record and this page both exist, the question of where the coffin is now has to be answered here rather than assumed.

It is not at Tahrir. Ahram Online, reporting on 1 October 2019, placed the coffin's first display in Egypt at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization at Fustat, at an inauguration attended by the Minister of Antiquities Khaled El-Enany and the United States Charge d'Affaires Thomas Goldberger. The Museum of Looted Antiquities, the peer-reviewed database of trafficked objects, records as of 2026 that the coffin is displayed at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. Two independently fetched sources, six years apart, put it at Fustat.

The point is worth labouring because the plan was different and the plan is what most accounts repeat. The case note published by the Art-Law Centre at the University of Geneva in June 2019 recorded that on its return the coffin would be temporarily displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square before being transferred to the Grand Egyptian Museum after its official opening, then expected in 2020. Neither leg of that plan is what happened. A reader who wants to stand in front of the coffin should go to Fustat, not to Tahrir and not to Giza.

The provenance of this collection is the whole argument of this publication, and it runs in both directions at once. The Antiquities Service and the museum that grew out of it exist because Egyptian antiquities were leaving the country in bulk in the nineteenth century, and the institution's founding purpose was to stop that and to keep the material in Egypt. The same century's export regime is why the great Egyptian collections of Europe and North America exist at all, and why almost every Egyptological museum outside Egypt is holding objects whose departure the Cairo museum was created to prevent.

The legal line that governs everything after it is Egypt's Law No. 117 of 1983 on the protection of antiquities. Before it, as Ahram Online summarised in reporting the Nedjemankh case, Egyptian law allowed the export of some artefacts; after it, lawful export became practically impossible and ownership vested in the state. That is precisely why the forger who supplied the Metropolitan chose 1971 as the date on the fake licence: a document dated before 1983 places an object on the permitted side of the line. A forger picking a year is picking a legal regime.

Two records in this archive are about objects that went home. The Euphronios krater went back to Italy from the Metropolitan; the coffin of Nedjemankh came back to Egypt from the same museum. Egypt's repatriation campaign is run through an Antiquities Repatriation Department, whose supervisor-general Shaaban Abdel-Gawad is quoted in the reporting on the Nedjemankh case describing the twenty months of investigation during which Egypt supplied the evidence of ownership and the proof that the export licence was fake. The pattern in that case - a looted object, a forged pre-1983 licence, a private collection that cannot be named, a European dealer network, a great museum's due diligence that asked the right question and then accepted the wrong answer - is the pattern this publication exists to record. It is also why the criticism on this page runs both ways. Egypt has a strong claim against the museums that hold its material. It also lost fifty-four objects out of its own national museum in a single night in 2011.

The museum stands on Tahrir Square, which is why it is in this story at all. On 28 January 2011, during the uprising, looters and protesters got into the building; reports cited in the Trafficking Culture account suggest as many as a thousand people were involved. They raided the museum shop for jewellery, smashed display cases and ransacked the ticket office. Nine people were reportedly arrested trying to leave through fire exits carrying the heads of two mummies, which had broken into pieces.

What followed was worse for the record than the theft itself, because the account kept changing. Early statements issued through the then Minister of Antiquities said that up to seventy objects had been damaged but that apparently nothing had been stolen; a later statement from the same office confirmed that a number of objects had in fact been taken. Objects then began turning up in the immediate neighbourhood: in mid-February 2011 a statue of Akhenaten was found amid rubbish close to Tahrir Square, and around the same time other pieces, including part of a broken wooden sarcophagus, were found on the ground east of the museum. Lists of the missing were published, first by the University of Pennsylvania's Cultural Heritage Center on 1 March 2011 and then by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities on 15 March 2011, the latter naming fifty-four objects. Further recoveries were made in March, and in May 2011 four statues were recovered in a police action, two of them confirmed as the museum's. In February 2012 the International Council of Museums launched an Emergency Red List of Egyptian Cultural Objects at Risk, compiled with the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Egyptian Museum, and launched it at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization.

How many of the fifty-four came back is not a number we will state, because no source we fetched states it authoritatively and the figures in circulation disagree with each other. The scholarly account we relied on is careful not to give a final total either. That gap is recorded in the open questions, where it belongs. What is not in doubt is the connection between this night and the coffin in our own records: the gilded coffin of Nedjemankh was dug out of the ground in the Minya region in the same autumn, in the same collapse of control, and the two events are one event.

The museum has been under a long, phased programme to put Dourgnon's building back. The initiative was launched in 2012 under the Ministry of Antiquities with the participation of the European Union, with the stated aim of restoring the museum to its original state as the French architect designed it in the late nineteenth century, and it has proceeded floor by floor: walls, floors, ceilings and glass.

The larger intervention is a European partnership. The ministry announced a grant of 3.1 million euros from the European Union, expected to run over three years, creating what it described as a first-time partnership between six of the most important museums in Europe - Turin, the Louvre, the British Museum, Berlin and Leiden are the ones the ministry names - together with the Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale. The brief was not decoration: a new strategic vision for the museum, a new display system, restoration and conservation laboratories and other facilities to international standards. The fabric schedule the ministry published is specific to the point of being touching about the state of the place: the roofs, the truss over the pool, the dome above the main entrance, the glass surfaces in the side halls, the replacement of all the museum's glass with laminated glass, repairs to floors and walls, and the restoration of the decoration and colour. An earlier phase had been completed with support from the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Two things are worth saying plainly about this. The first is that a museum needing a foreign grant to rebuild its display cases, while holding the largest collection of Pharaonic antiquities in the world, is a fact about resources rather than about scholarship. The second is that the ministry's own timetable did not hold: in November 2019 it told an audience of forty ambassadors that the museum's 118th anniversary the following year would coincide with the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum. Giza opened in November 2025, five years late, and the delay is the reason Tahrir kept the Tutankhamun collection for as long as it did. Anyone reading a guidebook printed before then is reading about a museum that no longer exists in that form.

We publish no visitor prose and cite no platform average, so what follows is drawn from the museum's and the ministry's own statements and from named reporting. The honest summary is that this is now a different museum from the one in most guidebooks. Between 2021 and 2025 the two things a first-time visitor arrives expecting were removed: twenty-two royal mummies went to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization at Fustat in April 2021, and the Tutankhamun collection of more than 5,000 objects went to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, the Tahrir Tutankhamun Gallery closing on 20 October 2025. What is left is not a remainder. It is the deepest collection of Egyptian antiquity on earth outside those two new buildings: the ministry still describes Tahrir as holding the largest collection of Pharaonic antiquities in the world, more than 160,000 objects across more than 100 halls, with a basement store holding what is not displayed. The museum is cheap for Egyptians and expensive for foreigners by published policy, open seven days, and the building is itself a listed monument under a restoration programme that has run in phases since 2012.