From a contemporary marketing perspective, the centenary of the discovery of pharaoh Tutankhamen’s 3,200-year-old tomb found on November 26, 1922, would have been the ideal date for the inauguration of Cairo’s spectacular Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). But in contemporary Egypt, life crawls at the pace of shuwaya, shuwaya, meaning “little, little,” akin to mañana (“tomorrow”) in Mexico. Hence not surprisingly, the grand opening of the GEM, which was set for July 3 – much delayed by revolutions, wars, financial crises, and the COVID pandemic – has been postponed yet again.
On June 14, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly announced that the GEM’s opening was being postponed to the last quarter of 2025 due to the deteriorating security situation in the region.
For wannabe archaeologists and Egyptologists, the two-decade delay promises to be well worth the wait. Located on the Giza plateau overlooking the Pyramids and the Sphinx on the western edge of sprawling Cairo, the $1.2 billion attraction showcases the cultural heritage of the ancient civilization of the Nile Valley.
Designed by the Dublin, Ireland, architect firm of Heneghan Peng, the GEM houses an unparalleled collection of more than 100,000 ancient Egyptian artifacts. No doubt the blockbuster attraction is 4,549 items discovered by Howard Carter in the tomb of King Tut.
Being touted as one of the world’s largest museums, the hyperbole seemingly has no end. Measuring a staggering 500,000 square meters, the massive building is twice as large as the Louvre in Paris, and two and a half times the size of the British Museum in London. In 2024, shortly after the GEM’s soft opening, UNESCO awarded the still unfinished museum its prestigious annual Prix Versailles for being one of the world’s most beautiful cultural institutions.
“We are exploring various options, potentially extending the festivities for several days or even weeks, including holding celebrations internationally,” promised Ahmed Ghoneim, CEO of the GEM, in an interview with ON TV.
“The format will be unlike any previous celebration,” he noted.
With panoply worthy of the pharaohs, he added that the Cairo-based United Media Services Company, which curated the historic Royal Mummies Parade in April 2021 and the Avenue of Sphinxes dedication ceremony in November 2021, is handling the GEM’s grand opening.
The challenge for the architects was to strike the right balance between ancient Egypt – a superpower of its epoch known for its innovations – and the modern country, a Third World failed state crushed by a population of 115 million and a staggering foreign debt. This balance between old and new, and luxury and poverty, starts at the expansive atrium that serves as the main entrance. Visitors there stand in awe of the granite statue of Ramesses II, the legendary ruler of Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty, who reigned from 1279-1213 BCE. Discovered broken into six fragments at a temple near Memphis, the restored 83-tonne colossus was erected in 1955 in Ramesses Square in front of Cairo’s main train station. There, with irony rivaling the poem “Ozymandias” which Percy Bysshe Shelley penned in 1817 after seeing the smashed masterpiece – “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” – the restored statue was being degraded by the exhaust and vibrations of the vast city’s perpetual traffic jam. It now stands preserved in pride of place.
Equally grandiose are the hanging obelisk, the grand staircase, and the main galleries, which include 12 exhibition halls. All of this is meant to evoke a paradigm shift restoring Egyptology back to the Egyptians. That field of study was established in 1798 when Napoleon and his army of soldiers and scientists arrived, found the Rosetta Stone, and shipped it back to Paris. France’s brief invasion of Egypt, followed by British, German, Austrian, and American excavations and studies, led to institutions approaching the subject through the Western lens of Orientalists. This developed challenges that Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries continue to address, such as the illicit trade in antiquities, and a foreign examination of Egypt’s cultural identity.
For Israeli visitors, among the GEM’s highlights will undoubtedly be the three-meter high black granite slab known as the Merneptah Stele. The inscription by the pharaoh who reigned for a decade beginning in 1213 BCE is largely an account of his military victories over the ancient Libyans and their allies. The last three of the 28 lines deal with a separate campaign in Canaan, then part of Egypt’s sphere. Line 27 proclaims, “Israel is laid waste – its seed is no more.” This is the earliest textual reference to biblical Israel, and the only one from ancient Egypt.
The stele, discovered by pioneering British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie at Thebes in 1896, had until recently been housed at the hopelessly inadequate Egyptian Museum in downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Time will tell if the GEM will facilitate the repatriation of Egypt’s patrimony, such as the painted stucco-coated limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti, the wife of pharaoh Akhenaten, now on display in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin; and the Rosetta Stone – looted by Napoleon’s scientists but now ensconced in the British Museum in London. Veteran archaeologist and former minister of tourism and antiquities Zahi Hawass has collected more than 1,000,000 signatures seeking to return Egypt’s ancient treasures.
While that campaign may take decades, it’s written in the stars that the GEM will anchor Egypt’s tourist trade and showcase whatever artifacts Hawass rescues. Indeed, there will never be a better reason to book your next holiday to sunny Egypt.■
For more information, see https://grandegyptianmuseum.org/.
King Tut’s curse due to fatal spores?
A French scientist’s research into the longevity of infectious microbes may have unlocked the secret of King Tut’s Curse. The pharaoh’s curse is blamed for Lord Carnarvon’s agonizing death after he entered the 3,200-year-old tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamen on November 26, 1922. The British adventurer, who financed archaeologist Howard Carter’s quest to find the tomb of the last king in the 18th dynasty in Egypt, may have fallen victim to a highly virulent disease that had lain dormant for millennia in the underground burial chamber.
Sylvain Gandon, a researcher at the Laboratoire d’Écologie in Paris, has shown that microscopic spores can become extremely potent and are capable of surviving for long periods outside a living host body. “The death of Lord Carnarvon could potentially be explained by infection with a highly virulent and very long-lived pathogen,” said Gandon. His findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, support Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s conviction that Carnarvon died after breathing germs in Tutankhamen’s burial chamber. Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, suggested that spores were deliberately placed there by priests to punish grave robbers.
The fabulous riches in the tomb of Tutankhamen, who lived from 1370–1352 BCE, stunned the world when they were discovered 103 years ago. When Carnarvon died in a Cairo hospital on April 23, 1923, after being the first person to enter the boy king’s mausoleum, stories of the pharaoh’s curse abounded.
Carnarvon’s death certificate said he died of complications from an infected mosquito bite. But journalists speculated that besides its treasure, Tutankhamen’s tomb contained a toxic poison. A number of other people who came into contact with King Tut’s remains also met mysterious ends. American archaeologists Arthur Mace and George Jay Gould both died within 24 hours of entering the tomb.
Archaeologist Nicholas Reeves, author of The Complete Tutankhamen, said there were reports of a black fungus inside the tomb. Carnarvon was already in poor physical condition when he arrived in Egypt and could have suffered a fatal infection as a result.
“There are fungi that can survive in a peculiar environment like a tomb and could well have affected someone like him,” Reeves said. He dismissed the idea of a curse, pointing out that if one existed, it spared the overwhelming majority of those most closely involved with the tomb exploration — including Carter, who died in 1939, and the man who performed an autopsy on King Tut’s mummy.
Gandon’s research explains the theoretical link between the virulence of a pathogen — a harmful bacterium, virus, or fungus — and the length of time it is able to survive as a spore. But how did the spores get into the tomb in the first place? “If the Egyptians were smart and really wanted to make a curse,” noted Gandon, “they could have taken a pathogen well known to them and put it in the tomb.”