The World’s Most Anticipated Museum Is Finally Open. (Well, Mostly.)

I was drawn to the outskirts of Cairo by the colossal complex in the desert — a towering site that arose over decades, built at unimaginable expense, with precisely cut stones sourced from local quarries; a set of buildings whose construction, plagued by extraordinary challenges, spanned the reigns of several rulers; a collective cultural testament, the largest of its kind, teeming with royal history.

No, I’m not referring to Giza’s famous pyramids. I came to see the Grand Egyptian Museum.

Approaching the museum’s main entrance. (The plaza contains an obelisk that is elevated on a granite base, allowing for views of the cartouche — an oval containing a royal name in hieroglyphics — of Ramses II.)

There is perhaps no institution on earth whose opening has been as wildly anticipated, or as mind-bogglingly delayed, as the Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo. Its construction has been such a fiasco — mired by funding lapses, logistical hurdles, a pandemic, nearby wars, revolutions (yes, plural) — that it begs comparison to that of the pyramids that lie just over a mile away on the Giza Plateau.

(The 4,600-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza, built from around 2.3 million stone blocks and without the use of wheels, pulleys or iron tools, took about 25 years to build, by some estimates. So far, the Grand Egyptian Museum has taken more than 20.)

Planned openings have come and gone since 2012. (Even The Times got it wrong; our list of 52 Places to Go in 2020 prematurely referred to the “fancy new digs for King Tut and company.”) In time, frustrations bubbled over for would-be visitors, many of whom had planned vacations around the new museum. “I have canceled two trips to Cairo because of anticipated opening dates and then delays,” one traveler wrote on the museum’s Instagram page this year. “I have wanted to visit since I was a child and the promise of the museum and constant delays is ruining that experience for so many people.”