The Egyptian Museum at Tahrir is the older of the two great Cairo museums — a salmon-pink neoclassical palace designed by the French architect Marcel Dourgnon, opened on 15 November 1902 by Khedive Abbas Hilmi II. For one hundred and twenty years it was, with the British Museum and the Louvre, one of the three places in the world to study pharaonic Egypt; for ninety of those years it was the sole national museum of the country. The transfer of the principal Tutankhamun collection to the Grand Egyptian Museum in 2025 changed Tahrir's role but did not diminish it. What remains is a great deal — and what arrives, in the slow process of recuration, is more.
The building itself
The Marcel Dourgnon design is one of the most successful museum buildings of the Beaux-Arts period. The central axial hall runs the full length of the structure under a glazed roof; the two upper galleries wrap around the perimeter and look down into the hall through the iron balustrades. The proportions are domestic in scale despite the immense collection — a Tahrir visitor never feels lost or overwhelmed. The salmon-pink ochre of the exterior is the original mineral pigment specified by Dourgnon and re-applied during the 2018 façade conservation. The building is, in itself, an object as worth studying as the antiquities inside it.
What moved, what stayed
The principal departures to the GEM were the Tutankhamun collection (in stages, 2020–2025), the eleven-metre Ramesses II colossus (2018), and the eighty-seven statues now mounted along the grand staircase. The Royal Mummies Hall moved earlier still — to the NMEC at Fustat, in April 2021. Many smaller collections moved in the same general period: a portion of the Greco-Roman material and selected Old Kingdom statuary among them.
What stayed at Tahrir is a great deal: the Old Kingdom statuary not selected for the staircase, the entire upper-floor Amarna collection, the Yuya and Tjuyu funerary assemblage, the prehistoric and Predynastic galleries, the cosmetic and jewellery collections, and the Late Period and Greco-Roman material that was not chosen for transfer. In rough terms, sixty percent of the catalogued holdings remain at Tahrir, and the building is being incrementally recurated to fill the spaces vacated by the moved collections.
What is worth a slow look
The Amarna gallery (upstairs, north wing)
The principal upstairs gallery dedicated to the Amarna interlude (c. 1352–1336 BCE) holds the finest portrait sculpture in the building. Several heads of the family of Akhenaten — the elongated profiles, the soft eyes, the rounded chins, the queen Nefertiti's serene three-quarter pose — were excavated from the workshop of the master sculptor Thutmose at Tell el-Amarna. The room is dim, the cabinets shallow, and the objects close to the visitor; twenty unhurried minutes here are more rewarding than any equivalent stretch in the building.
Yuya and Tjuyu (upstairs, south wing)
Yuya and Tjuyu were the parents-in-law of Amenhotep III and the grandparents of Akhenaten. Their tomb (KV46), found by James Quibell in 1905, was the most complete royal burial known before Tutankhamun. The gilded coffins, the magnificent painted chair of Princess Sitamun, the canopic chest with the four embalming-jar guardian goddesses — all sit in a central hall on the upper level. The pieces are exceptional, and they are, for the time being, less photographed than they deserve to be.
The Old Kingdom statuary (ground floor, central)
The Old Kingdom gallery remains the strongest pedagogical room in Egyptian art. The seated scribe of Saqqara (CG 36); the wooden statue of Ka-Aper, known as Sheikh el-Beled, the Headman of the Village (CG 34); the painted limestone group of Rahotep and Nofret (CG 3 and CG 4) — these are works of the third millennium BCE, and they remain the most lifelike portraits of the entire ancient Mediterranean. The room is on the ground floor immediately past the entrance hall; do not pass it for the Tutankhamun rooms upstairs.
The prehistoric and Predynastic galleries
A small but exceptional set of rooms at the south end of the ground floor presents the material before the first dynasty. The Gerzeh palette, the Hierakonpolis pottery and ivories, the Cosmetic palettes of the Naqada cultures — and the Narmer Palette itself (CG 14716), which is here, not at the GEM, and which is the single most foundational object of dynastic Egypt. The room is quiet on weekday afternoons; the Narmer Palette is mounted at adult eye height in its own central case.
The Greco-Roman cabinet (upper, west)
A small room above the central hall holds the Fayum portraits — the painted mummy panels of Greco-Roman Egypt from the first to fourth centuries CE — and a selection of Hellenistic statuary. The Fayum portraits are the most direct gaze you will encounter in the building: a young woman, a soldier, a child, looking at you across nineteen centuries. The room is often missed; it is worth fifteen minutes.
Current state of the building
The Tahrir museum is in active reorganisation as of early 2026. The vacated Tutankhamun rooms on the upper floor are being repurposed for a new presentation of the Amarna collection at greater depth than before. The central ground-floor hall is being prepared for a new permanent installation around the theme of The Long Twentieth Century of the Museum Itself — an institutional reflection on the history of the building, the early excavations, and the long relationship between Egyptology and the country. The opening of these spaces is announced for autumn 2026.
A practical note: some galleries are intermittently closed during the recuration. The floor plan handed out at the entrance lists the current closures; for a focused visit, ask at the information desk whether the Amarna room and the Yuya and Tjuyu hall are open before purchasing entry.
The book-shop and library
The Tahrir museum book-shop, in a small room off the south corridor of the ground floor, holds a respectable selection of academic publications in English, French and Arabic. The IFAO (Institut français d'archéologie orientale) and the SCA's own catalogues are sold here at near-cover price. The library proper, on the upper administrative floor, is accessible to scholars by application.
The Tahrir museum is now a museum about itself as well as about Egypt. That is not a diminishment; it is the natural second life of any institution this old.
Practicalities
- 09:00 – 17:00 daily, with extended hours 09:00 – 21:00 on Sundays and Thursdays.
- The Royal Mummies Hall is no longer at Tahrir; visitors interested in the royal mummies should plan for NMEC at Fustat.
- Allow two to two-and-a-half hours, longer if both the Amarna and Yuya rooms are open.
- Photography is permitted; flash and tripod are not.
- The central courtyard café reopened in 2025 after restoration; an iced karkadeh is the editor's standard pause.
Entry verified, March 2026. Gallery arrangements are in active revision through to autumn 2026; readers are advised to confirm room openings at the desk.