Inside the Grand Egyptian Museum: Egypt’s $1bn ‘Fourth Pyramid’ Opens Near Giza

Inside the Grand Egyptian Museum

After roughly two decades of planning and construction and an estimated cost of $1 billion, the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) opened to the public this week, days after a formal inauguration. Positioned about 2 km (1.2 miles) from the Giza pyramids and roughly 8 km (5 miles) from central Cairo, the GEM has been described as the "fourth pyramid" of the Giza Plateau.

Scale, design and layout

The complex covers nearly 500,000 square metres (about 5.38 million sq ft) and includes the main museum building, a conference centre, a central courtyard, a Nile Valley park, the Khufu Boat Museum and a conservation centre. The museum’s interior exhibition space totals about 45,000 sq metres (484,000 sq ft), making it the sixth-largest museum in the world by display area.

The design, by Irish architecture firm Heneghan Peng, echoes pyramid geometry: the main building follows a chamfered-triangle plan with its north and south façades aligned to the Pyramid of Khufu and the Pyramid of Menkaure. Materials include sand-hued concrete, translucent alabaster panels and a principal façade of frosted glass that evokes the colours and light of the desert landscape.

Highlights and major exhibits

The GEM will house more than 100,000 artefacts spanning 30 dynasties of pharaonic Egypt. Key attractions include:

• The colossal statue of King Ramses II — a 3,200-year-old figure standing 11.36 metres (37 ft) tall and weighing about 83 tonnes. The statue stood in Ramses Square from 1954 until 2006; it was later transported upright on a custom 128-wheel vehicle over a 30 km (19-mile) route to its new setting near the museum.
• The Tutankhamun Gallery — a 7,500 sq metre (80,000 sq ft) hall displaying more than 5,000 objects recovered from the boy king’s tomb, including his golden funerary mask, throne, sarcophagi, chariots and jewellery, arranged to evoke the atmosphere of his burial chamber.
• Khufu’s Boat — a 4,500-year-old intact ship attributed to Pharaoh Khufu, one of the oldest surviving vessels in the world.

Exhibitions and visitor experience

The museum’s permanent displays are organised by era (from prehistory through the Greco‑Roman period) and by theme (such as society, kingship and belief). Visitors enter under the dramatic presence of Ramses II and ascend a six-storey grand staircase flanked by roughly 60 artefacts — statues of deities, sarcophagi, columns and stelae inscribed with important texts.

Although the project was announced in 1992, construction began in 2005 and was delayed by political upheaval after the 2011 Arab Spring and by the COVID-19 pandemic. Portions of the complex opened softly in 2024; this public opening represents a major milestone for Egypt’s cultural infrastructure.

Significance for tourism and culture

The GEM is intended to centralise, conserve and interpret Egypt’s archaeological heritage and to strengthen the country’s cultural tourism sector. Tourism is a key source of foreign currency for Egypt: a record 15.7 million tourists visited in 2024, and the travel and tourism sector contributed roughly 8% of GDP, according to official figures.

"The Grand Egyptian Museum combines world-class conservation facilities with an ambitious public display of Egypt’s ancient civilisation — a major new gateway to the Giza Plateau and to Egypt’s past."

Visitors can view the Giza pyramids from inside the museum, reinforcing the site’s unique relationship to the landscape that produced many of the objects on display.