CAIRO: Prime ministers, presidents and royalty descended on Cairo on Saturday to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new billion-dollar museum built near the Pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities.

The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, pandemic and wars in neighbouring countries.

“We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a press conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a country whose history goes back more than 7,000 years”.

Spectators including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi gathered late on Saturday before an enormous screen outside the museum, which projected images of the country’s most famous cultural sites as dancers in glittering pharaonic-style garb waved glowing orbs and sceptres.

‘New chapter’ for Egypt

They were accompanied by Egyptian pop stars and an international orchestra decked out in white beneath a sky lit with lasers, fireworks and hovering lights that formed into moving hieroglyphics.

By opening the museum, Egypt was “writing a new chapter in the story of this ancient nation’s present and future,” Sisi said at the opening.

The audience included German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Democratic Republic of Congo President Felix Tshisekedi, and the crown princes of Oman and Bahrain.

The museum’s most heavily promoted attraction is the expansive collection of treasures from Tutankhamun’s tomb, uncovered in 1922, including the boy-king’s golden burial mask, throne and sarcophagus, and thousands of other objects.

A colossal statue of Ramses II that sat for decades in a downtown Cairo square bearing the pharaoh’s name now adorns the grand entry hall.

Published in Dawn, November 2nd, 2025