The Egyptian Museum, Tahrir Square: Tutankhamun Before the Big Move

The Egyptian Museum is a short drive from the Four Seasons Hotel. We took London Cab and reached there before it opened at 9 am. A lot of people were already there waiting for the museum to open.

You only need to pay an additional fee if you want to take pictures with a camera. Taking pictures with a mobile phone is free.

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo houses over 120,000 artifacts, including the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb and most of the mummies discovered since the 19th century.

The museum’s exhibits span from the beginning of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt (approximately 2700 BC) through the Greco-Roman period. The building consists of two floors.

On the ground floor, you can follow the history of Egypt from the Old Kingdom through the Greco-Roman period by turning left at the entrance and looping around the museum. This provides good background for most of Egypt’s ancient history.

Upstairs, the museum is organized thematically, with a large portion of the space taken up by the exhibit of Tutankhamun’s tomb contents, including his famous funerary mask. Also upstairs is the room dedicated to the beautiful jewelry discovered in the Royal Tombs of Tanis.

Another highlight of the museum, the Royal Mummy Room, requires a separate ticket. Inside, you can see the mummies of some of Egypt’s most famous pharaohs, including Ramesses II, Seti I, and Egypt’s only queen, Hatshepsut.

After spending a good amount of time on the ground floor, we went upstairs and headed into the Mummy Room first to avoid the crowds later. A lot of people visit the museum with a tour, and the Mummy Room is definitely a highlight that tours tend to leave until the end.

The Egyptian Museum was scheduled to relocate to the Giza area near the pyramids sometime the following year (2020). We could already see some artifacts wrapped up, and parts of the place looked a little messy. Not every artifact was labeled, so if you’re into museums, it’s best to have a guide. I could imagine that once the new Egyptian Museum finally opened, people would opt to stay in Giza instead. At the time, there were only two five-star hotels in the area, the Marriott and the Meridien. Giza is around 22 km from downtown Cairo, where most five-star hotels are located.

We left the museum in the afternoon, ordered a London Cab to take us back to our hotel, had lunch, and then headed to the airport to catch our flight to Aswan.

An Update from 2026: The Relocation Actually Happened

The move took a lot longer than the “sometime next year” we were told back then, but it did eventually happen. The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), right by the Giza Plateau, had a limited soft opening in October 2024 and fully opened to the public in November 2025, more than five years after our visit. It now holds the complete Tutankhamun collection, including his famous funerary mask, displayed together in one place for the first time, along with Khufu’s Solar Boat and more than 100,000 other artifacts spanning Egypt’s ancient history. Tickets run around 1,450–1,590 EGP for foreign adults, and it operates as a fully digital, timed-entry facility, quite a different experience from the slightly chaotic, cash-and-paper-ticket system we navigated at the old museum.

The old Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, the one described in this post, is still open, and the government has confirmed it’ll remain open at least through 2030. But it no longer has Tutankhamun’s treasures; those moved to the GEM along with everything else that made our upstairs visit so crowded. What Tahrir does still have, and what the GEM doesn’t, is the Royal Mummy Room, so it’s still very much worth visiting for Ramesses II, Seti I, and Hatshepsut. As of 2026, general entry to Tahrir runs around 550 EGP for foreign visitors, and photography rules are similar to what we described, free with a phone, an extra fee for a proper camera, though there’s now a specific added fee (around 200 EGP) if you want to photograph inside the Mummy Room itself.

Our prediction about Giza turned out to be right, and then some. The hotel landscape there has genuinely transformed since the two-option days of just the Marriott and the Meridien. The area now also has Steigenberger Pyramids Cairo, the Four Seasons Hotel Cairo at First Residence, Hyatt Regency Cairo West, Sheraton Cairo Hotel & Casino, and a growing list of smaller pyramid-view boutique properties, with more still in the pipeline (Sonesta has announced a Royal Sonesta Pyramids property slated for 2028). If you’re visiting today, staying in Giza rather than downtown is a genuinely reasonable option in a way it simply wasn’t when we were there, especially now that the pyramids and a world-class museum sit right next to each other.

If we were planning this leg of the trip again today, we’d likely split it differently: a full day for Giza plus the GEM together, since they’re only about 2 km apart, and a separate, shorter visit to Tahrir specifically for the Royal Mummies and the older museum’s particular charm, wrapped artifacts and all.

Looking back, I’m oddly glad we caught the old museum in that in-between state, half-organized, half-packed into crates, artifacts sitting quietly next to each other without much fanfare or fuss. There was something almost intimate about standing that close to Tutankhamun’s mask in a slightly worn, un-air-conditioned room, rather than behind the glass and crowd-control ropes of a brand-new, world-class facility. Cairo gave us that one last version of the museum before it changed for good, and I don’t think we fully appreciated it at the time. From there, it was on to the airport, and the next chapter of the trip: Aswan, and the beginning of the Upper Egypt leg with Waleed.