The Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square is the historic home of ancient Egypt's treasures, in the heart of downtown Cairo. Opened in 1902 in a grand salmon-pink neoclassical building designed by the French architect Marcel Dourgnon, it is the original Egyptian Museum — not the newer Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, and not the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation. For more than a century it has been the place where the world came to meet the pharaohs.
Inside is the world's greatest collection of pharaonic antiquities — well over a hundred thousand objects spanning more than three thousand years, from the earliest dynasties to the Greco-Roman age. Its most famous holdings are the treasures of Tutankhamun, discovered intact by Howard Carter in 1922: the solid-gold funerary mask, the nested coffins, the throne, the jewellery and the everyday objects buried with the boy king. Colossal statues, painted sarcophagi, papyri and the relics of Egypt's greatest rulers fill gallery after gallery on two floors.
The museum stands directly on Tahrir Square, downtown Cairo, an easy walk or short ride from the Nile-side hotels and a natural pairing with the pyramids of Giza on a wider Cairo itinerary. The standard ticket is open-dated: you choose your day, arrive during opening hours, and walk straight in. Note that the Royal Mummies, once shown here, moved to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in 2021, so they are no longer part of a visit to this museum.