The Grand Egyptian Museum and Other Adventures in Egypt ~ by Lesley Downer

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.’

Ramses II at Luxor -
Ozymandias, King of Kings

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

The Grand Egyptian Museum opened to huge fanfare on November 1st 2025. So when I planned a visit to Egypt in January, the first thing I did was book a ticket.

The museum is a long way from the centre of Cairo, on the edge of the Sahara, near the Pyramids and the Sphinx. It’s mammoth, designed to echo the pyramids, with sloping triangular walls and hieroglyphic decorations. Just getting from the gate to the entrance of the building is a long walk.

Once inside, the sheer size is breathtaking. The building soars above you. It’s the largest collection in the world of archaeological treasures devoted to a single civilisation.

Ramses dominates the atrium
of the Grand Egyptian Museum

Ramses II
The ground floor is dominated by an 11 metre (36 feet) tall statue of Ramses II (1303 - 1213 BCE), which is 3200 years old. The greatest and most powerful of all the pharaohs, Ramses fought wars, expanded his kingdom and commissioned colossal awe-inspiring statues of himself right across Egypt, including four vast statues at Abu Simbel - though even he might not have imagined that people would still pay homage to him three millennia later or that he would be immortalised by Percy Bysshe Shelley under the Greek form of his name, Ozymandias.

Having paid my respects to Ramses, I set off to explore the museum. Broad steps lead up to the exhibition halls on the third floor, on which sit or stand monumental, exquisitely-carved statues. The mammoth images of pharaohs and gods dwarf us mere humans who climb up. From the top you can see the pyramids shimmering in the desert.

Sneferu - battered but
amazingly ancient

There are twenty galleries on the third floor, arranged by era. They trace the history of ancient Egypt beginning with hunter gatherers and the earliest dynasties, around the 27th century BCE, right through to the advent of Greek and Roman influences in the early centuries CE.

One of the earliest artefacts is a battered but marvellous statue of Sneferu (2700 - 2200 BCE), which dates from 2600 BCE. A pioneer of pyramid building, he commissioned four pyramids including the Bent pyramid, whose bulging walls make it look a bit like a yurt.

Gallery after gallery is filled with amazing sculptures of gods and pharaohs, priests and scribes, many adorned with hieroglyphs. There are perfectly crafted models of boats and houses along with models of servants that would have been placed in tombs so that the dead could continue to enjoy the pleasures of this world, and which create a feeling for what the life of those ancient times was like. There’s also an absorbing section recreating the interior of some of the key tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.

On the way down one can take in the Tutankhamen Galleries and the Khufu Boat Galleries.

Shimmering in the desert - 
Pyramids and sphinx

It’s wonderful that these artefacts, this precious heritage of mankind, have been gathered together and carefully conserved and preserved. Most are perfect, intact and largely undamaged. It’s amazing that despite grave robbers and looters and British and French armies carting stuff away by the shipload there’s still so much right here in Egypt. It’s reason to celebrate and a good reason to visit Egypt. The Egyptian authorities are trying to reclaim treasures from Britain and France - such as the Rosetta Stone.

The museum is a marvellous showcase for these astonishing creations - the size of them, the beauty. It’s also a taster. After all, this was a living culture. These are objects that living people admired or worshipped or stood in awe before. And here in Egypt we can see artefacts like these in the actual temples in which they were intended to be seen, where they belong.

Pyramids and Sphinx
So you step out of the cool architect-designed museum into the blazing sun and the mad chaos of the Egyptian streets and take an Uber (the best method) through the honking surging Giza traffic to the pyramids.

I first visited in 1997. In those days you just went. Now you need a ticket. There’s a shuttle bus to take you from one to the next, and a lot of people.

 

The temple at Luxor

But no matter how many crowds there are, nothing can detract from their majesty and mystery, the sheer age and solidity and symmetry and size of them and the vastness of the desert that stretches behind. The Great Pyramid is 4600 years old. It’s of a physical scale that defies human comprehension and a time scale beyond imagination.

The Sphinx is if anything even more alluring and mysterious. It was probably commissioned by Khufu between 2590 and 2566 BCE, around the same time as the Great Pyramid, and the face is his. There is a stele between the paws, placed there by Pharaoh Tuthmose IV 1200 years later, in 1401 BCE. On it he records his dream, in which the sphinx asked him to clear away the sand that half concealed it after all those centuries and promised that if he did, he would become pharaoh. The gap of time between the sphinx and Thutmose is longer than between us and 1066.

The Temple at Luxor: Apotheosis of Ramses II
To set these ancient images more in their context you need to take a felucca down the Nile to the small palm-fringed town of Luxor. The temple at Luxor is breath-takingly beautiful. It was founded and laid out by Amenophis III (1417 - 1379 BCE) on the edge of the Nile. It’s a perfect, quite compact structure, with courts lined with towering pillars inscribed with hieroglyphs.

The Nile at Luxor

The temple reached its pinnacle of perfection under the great conqueror Ramses II - Ozymandias himself - a hundred years after Thutmose. The statue of Ramses II here is colossal yet delicate at the same time, and epic in scale. It conveys awesome power and divinity.

Of course all that power - and all that divinity - has long since vanished, leaving behind only magnificent monuments for us lesser mortals to contemplate:

‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

PS You can also see Ramses at Battersea Power Station! What would he have thought of that!

Photo of colossal statue of Ramses at Grand Egyptian Museum by Richard Mortel, originally posted on Flickr at https://flickr.com/photos/43714545@N06/54298959040 via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Sneferu at Cairo Museum by Richard Mortel, originally posted on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/prof_richard/54297653082/ via Wikimedia Commons. 

The other photos are mine. 

Lesley Downer is a lover of ancient times and foreign places. She had two books out in 2024: The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications) - 16,500 years of Japanese history in 50,000 words, full of stories and colourful characters - and her first ‘real’ book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, reissued by Eland under her new pen name to acknowledge her Chinese roots - Lesley Chan Downer. Since then she has been enjoying seeing places that are not Japan. Back to Japan soon! 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com