History

The creation of a purpose-built Egyptian antiquities museum was the project of Auguste Mariette, the French archaeologist who founded the Egyptian Antiquities Service in 1858 and opened the first Boulaq Museum on the Nile in 1863. Mariette’s concern was to halt the export of antiquities to Europe — a trade that had stripped sites from Luxor to Alexandria for three centuries. The Boulaq building proved too small and flood-prone; its collection moved to a Giza palace in 1891, but that too was inadequate. The Egyptian government held an international competition in 1895 for a permanent solution: Marcel Dourgnon, a Prix de Rome laureate, submitted the winning entry.

Construction at the Tahrir Square site proceeded from 1897, using Egyptian workers under Italian site supervisors and local limestone quarried at Moqattam. The building opened in November 1902 with Gaston Maspero as director — under his tenure the Tutankhamun discovery (1922, Howard Carter) would add its unmatched collection to the holdings. The façade carries allegorical reliefs representing Egypt and its regions, rendered in the French academic idiom. Inside, the double-height central atrium is ringed by two tiers of galleries in a U-shape, the same spatial logic as the grands musées of Paris from which Dourgnon had drawn his training.

The museum survived the 2011 revolution largely intact, though a small number of objects were damaged or stolen during the unrest of January–February. The Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, under construction for two decades, has been receiving transfers of the most fragile and famous objects; the 1902 building will remain as a heritage institution with a different interpretive focus.