A $1 billion museum built to showcase the finest of ancient Egyptian artifacts has finally been opened in Giza after more than 2 decades of planning, building, and setbacks.

Fireworks and drone light shows lit up the desert night. Below, a gala of Egyptian elite, heads of state, and foreign dignitaries gathered around the spectacular building to celebrate the opening.

Comparable perhaps only to Classical Rome and Ming China, no civilization has physically endured as much as the dynasties of Egypt, leaving behind millions of artifacts and buildings.

Seeking for a generation to build a showroom for the cream of this archaeological crop, the Egyptian government hopes it’s opening fully-demonstrates the state’s commitment to protecting this heritage for all time.

“We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said during a press conference, per Reuters. He then called the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world.”

Farouq Hosny, Egypt’s former culture minister, recounts the unusual genesis of the landmark museum to the country’s National News. It started when a prominent Italian publisher and designer, Franco Maria Ricci, came to visit the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in central Cairo, and called it “a storage warehouse.”

“To my own surprise, the anger I felt prompted me to tell him that we plan to build the world’s largest museum in Egypt,” Mr. Hosny, who was culture minister between 1987 and 2011, told the National.

“That was in 1992, and we certainly were not building or even thinking of building anything at the time. But I made that up because I was so angry.”

Not only was it conceived under duress, but its gestation and birth would navigate a similar path. It wouldn’t be for another decade that construction began on the building, a process that would be dramatically interrupted multiple times.

To take a stroll down a sandy, debris-landed memory lane, there were the small matters of the 2008 Financial Crisis, the Arab Spring, the coup d’etat against the subsequently-elected Muslim Brotherhood administration, regional tensions and terrorist attacks stemming from multiple conflicts (none of which Egypt was actually a part of), and COVID-19. Since 2020, the museum has attempted to open no less than 5 times, each of which had to be delayed.

From Egypt with love

The building amassed a $1.2 billion price tag by the time it was finished. The absolutely striking and fantastic design came from Heneghan Peng Architects, from Ireland. From straight on, it aligns almost perfectly with the edge of one of the pyramids in the distance.

Pyramids and triangles are incorporated everywhere you look across the 120-acre site.

“The museum’s design was created to work in dialogue with the scale and mathematical precision of the pyramids,” said Roisin Heneghan, co-founder of Heneghan Peng Architects

“This is the first time in history that many of these artifacts will be shown together, so it was important that the design worked to strengthen this connection to place and honor the rich history of ancient Egypt,” Heneghan told Deseret News.

The museum contains 968,000 square feet of gallery space across 12 wings, spanning the most ancient times to the Greco-Roman dominion of Egypt. 100,000 artifacts are held within, making it the largest archaeological museum in the world devoted to a single civilization, according to Reuters.

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80,000 square feet are dedicated to the tomb treasures of Tutankhamun alone, of which 5,600 are present including his resplendent funerary mask.

“I had the idea of displaying the complete tomb, which means nothing remains in storage, nothing remains in other museums, and you get to have the complete experience, the way Howard Carter had it over a hundred years ago,” Tarek Tawfik, president of the International Association of Egyptologists told the BBC.

Far more than only King Tut, the museum contains a “best of ancient Egypt” the likes of which has never been assembled before, and includes, among countless other treasures, a 3,200-year-old statue of Ramses II standing 30 feet tall, as well as the 42-meter-long funerary boat of Khufu—dating to 2,500 BCE.

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Officials hope the new museum can end a perception that Egypt isn’t up to the standard of protecting and preserving its antiquities, and lend weight to its claims for Egyptian objects held in museums abroad, like the Bust of Nefertiti, to be returned.

“The GEM is not a replica of the Louvre or the British Museum. It is Egypt’s response to both. Those museums were born of empire; this one is born of authenticity,” a special edition of state-run Al-Ahram Weekly wrote about the museum, which called it “a philosophy, as much as a building.”

WATCH a tour of the museum below…

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