Egypt opens Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza to boost tourism

Egypt held a lavish inauguration on Saturday for the long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum, a $1 billion complex on the Giza Plateau that officials say will open to the public on Nov. 4 and aims to bolster the country’s vital tourism sector. The museum, located adjacent to the Pyramids and the Sphinx, houses more than 50,000 artifacts and will exhibit the full collection of treasures from King Tutankhamun’s tomb, officials said.

Government representatives and visiting heads of state attended the opening ceremony, authorities said. The facility, billed as the world’s largest museum dedicated to a single civilization, features roughly 24,000 square meters of permanent exhibition space, 12 main galleries spanning prehistoric to Roman eras, conservation laboratories and storage areas for researchers. A 36 foot statue of Ramses II stands in the atrium, and two new halls will display the approximately 5,000 objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb together for the first time since the tomb’s 1922 discovery.

Construction began in 2005 but was repeatedly delayed by the 2011 uprising, the COVID-19 pandemic and other regional disruptions, officials and experts say. The complex had been partially open...