Can Cairo's Egyptian Museum (the one without the Grand in its title) preserve its place on the tourist trail?

The city's original showcase of historical treasures risks becoming a relic itself with the opening of its spectacular new rival

The storied treasures of Tutankhamun are gone. In their place are the modest, though still gold and silver, funerary items belonging to an obscure king – Psusennes I – who ruled Egypt some 3,000 years ago.

Also gone are the dozens of tour buses that had for decades brought hordes of foreign tourists to the Egyptian Museum, a Cairo landmark that was for more than a century a must-visit site for foreign visitors and a place etched in the collective memory of many generations of Egyptians.

The Egyptian Museum, in the bustling heart of the capital, has been almost totally eclipsed by the much larger, state of the art Grand Egyptian Museum (Gem) the formal opening of which on November 1 was marked with an extravagant ceremony attended by royals and heads of state.

Thirty years in the making, the new museum near the Giza Pyramids has been all the rage in Egypt since it opened, with thousands of foreign tourists and locals thronging its galleries, where they are captivated by majestic statues and the treasures of Tutankhamun – and pleasantly surprised by the adequacy and cleanliness of amenities, a rarity in Egypt's public spaces.

Gem's first day of being open to the public. Mohamed Fathi / The National

So popular has the Gem become over a short period of time that its management has had to introduce online booking to keep the number of visitors within the museum's maximum capacity, after days of up to 18,000 visitors.

It's a different story, and perhaps even a sad one, at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir. There could not have been more than 200 to 300 visitors inside the museum on one recent day, and only a handful of tour buses waiting outside. The gift shops were deserted and so were the cafes in its front garden.

Housed in a salmon-coloured, marble-floored, two-storey building widely viewed as an architectural gem, the old museum is facing the threat of oblivion, or at least irrelevance, if it cannot be rebranded, and quickly.

The museum is a centre of societal activities and regularly hosts school trips and has designated days for young orphans and people with special needs, but many believe it needs to do more of that to remain relevant.

But to foreign tourists – the vast majority of the museum's patrons – that may not be enough to restore the glory and prominence the museum once had.

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

“Most tourists are in Cairo for two to three days at the most. They will do the Gem, the Museum of Civilisations (opened in 2021) and maybe the castle of Saladin. The museum in Tahrir has been dropped by most tour operators,” said Ahmed Mustafa, a tour guide with more than three decades of experience in the business.

“The only way forward perhaps for the Tahrir museum may be to close and renovate. It still has magnificent pieces that I am, quite frankly, surprised they did not take to the Gem,” he said.

“It retains an exceptional and unique historical value despite the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum,” Antiquities and Tourism Minister Sherif Fathy told local Egyptologists and museum experts who met him this week to discuss the future of the Egyptian Museum.

“Maintaining and developing the museum is a maximum priority for the ministry,” said Mr Fathy, who asked participants to come up with a plan to develop the museum.

Prominent Egyptologist Monica Hanna suggests that rebranding or redefining the Egyptian Museum may be the best remedy for the museum's woes. “It should not continue to be just a collection of display cases for foreign tourists to look at. Its philosophy is outdated. It needs a new one. We need a new vision for it,” she told The National.

The perceived threat from the Gem was identified long before the newer museum opened. In 2018, curators from the five European museums with the largest Egyptian collections worked with the museum in Cairo and Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities on an EU-funded project, lasting almost five years, on how to transform the museum to remain of interest to locals and foreign tourists alike.

The ground floor of the Egyptian museum in Cairo's central Tahrir square . Hamza Hendawi / The National

“We knew then that the museum in Tahrir will be lost when the Gem opens. What we did not know was that the opening of the Gem would get delayed until this year,” said Heba Abd el Gawad, a London-based Egyptian museum expert and anthropologist who participated in the study.

“We also wanted to revive the museum to face the challenges of the 21st century,” Ms Abd el Gawad, a senior curator in London's Horniman Museum, told The National. “The museum has a workforce of outstanding curators and conservation teams with decades of experience. It has a long history of community interactions. It does have a huge resonance in our collective memory.”

Moreover, the museum's location is unique, overlooking Tahrir Square, the centre of the 2011 uprising that toppled the autocratic ruler Hosni Mubarak. It's a little more than a stone's throw from the Nile and stands at the entrance of Cairo's Khedival downtown, where buildings are a fusion of European architectural styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“The museum has a piece of every one of us. In many ways, it tells the story of many of Egypt's historical layers, including ancient Egypt, the colonial era and modern-day political upheavals,” said Ms Abd el Gawad.

Long criticised for its cluttering and somewhat primitive methods of display, the museum has gone through a dramatic though partial transformation since the conclusion of the study in 2023. Now, according to Ms Abd el Gawad, it needs only some additional work to qualify as a Unesco heritage site, including better ventilation and lighting as well as reduced risk to the building from electrical and fire hazards.

Visitors at the 123-year-old Egyptian museum in central Cairo. Hamza Hendawi / The National

Already, the museum's ground floor has been transformed, with rare and magnificent pieces dating back to the pre-dynastic, Old Kingdom and Greco-Roman eras restored and rearranged, with better lighting provided. Shutters were also installed in the museum's long windows to protect the antiquities from being damaged by sun rays, and more informative descriptions of the artefacts have been plastered on the display cases.

The opening of the Gem, and, to a lesser extent, the uncertainty over the future of the older museum, have unleashed a sense of deep pride in the country's heritage among Egypt's 108 million population, with many on social media using AI to post photos of themselves in pharaonic garb or posing inside the Gem.

Among intellectuals, a debate, also inspired by the collective celebration of the Gem, is playing out on social media over the thorny question of whether being Egyptian alludes to an ethnicity or a reference to a culture that has over the centuries made the country a melting pot for people with diverse ethnic, cultural and religious affiliations.

But for the Gem and its forerunner in central Cairo, the debate is about the most ethical function of museums and whether there can be a feasible substitute for them.

“As Egyptians, we need to collectively reflect on how we can care for our heritage and its colonial legacy that's bestowed on us. It's a heavy legacy that we are left with and the world pressures us to protect rather than claim it as our own.

“We need to think of the ethics of displaying items that are in reality the personal belongings of our ancestors. They are divine entities to those who once owned them and are a part of a religious structure. It's possible that our ancestors whose mummified bodies are on display would not have approved of us putting them on display.”