On the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Walking across the wide courtyard, you come to an open-ended pyramid in the middle of the pylon-like complex that is the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). This is the first design statement of what is now the world’s largest archaeological museum. It is a reversal of ancient Egypt—it doesn’t diminish its grandeur but rather brings it to life. In ancient Egypt, a covered path, like a tunnel, led from the valley temple to the pyramids; here, it is a wide courtyard. In ancient Egypt, the pyramid was closed; here, the entrance, set into the design of an open pyramid, invites visitors in, entices them in, even sucks them in. That’s how history is: its narrative draws us in!
Visitors to the museum are greeted by an 11-meter-high, 82-ton granite statue of Ramses II at the center of a 32-meter-high atrium. For 50 years, the statue stood exposed to exhaust fumes in front of Cairo’s main train station. From the atrium, two grand staircases lead further up. The steps are shared with 90 statues of pharaohs and gods spanning 3,000 years of ancient Egypt. What a sight! The demigods and gods are near, they are commonplace, and they only loom upwards when you pause. This is the second prologue, after encountering Ramses II in the atrium, before entering the actual halls of the museum. Again and again, your gaze drifts to the angled wall surfaces divided into triangles—small and large echoes of pyramidal order.
The stone features of the statues, these archetypes of human greatness, are mirrored on the screens of cell phones. Why are so many photos being taken? Probably because we have lost confidence in our own eyes. But the museum helps us regain it. If the experience at the entrance was the pull of history, now it is the bodily experience of ascent. History lifts us up! After 150 steps, you reach the top and look out at the three pyramids of Giza through the large glass windows in front of you. Like the Acropolis Museum in Athens, which opened in 2009, the new Egyptian Museum has the perfect location. When you can finally tear yourself away from the sight of the pyramids, there is a gradual descent through twelve great halls.
Eternity in the Twilight
Remembering the climb, the ascent feels alive within you. When we engage with history, we soar—we fly through time. This begins, for the roughly 3,000-year-old empire, in three halls dedicated to the Old Kingdom, followed by three lower halls for the Middle Kingdom and three for the New Kingdom. Continuing down, you encounter the Late Period and finally the eras of Greek and Roman rule. After a long descent, you arrive at a Roman statue seemingly in the here and now—the birth of the independent personality.
The Stuttgart-based museum and exhibition design studio Brückner was commissioned to furnish the GEM. The centerpiece is Tutankhamun’s burial chamber. In the dim light, the gold of the shrines, sarcophagi, and tomb guardians glitters. Then there is that unique mask, possibly the most widely recognized of all the artifacts. The dim light invites visitors to enter into their own state of twilight, so that they can view these art treasures not with the alert eye of the intellect but with the gentle gaze of an awakened dreamer. The 5,000 artifacts of the burial tunnels are abstracted and modeled after the original discovery site. Above the heads of the exhibition visitors, a long strip of fabric glows in constantly changing light. Shirin Brückner calls this choreographed light the “Path of the Sun.” It is intended to make perceptible Egypt’s concept of the afterlife, according to which earthly life is the preparation for the actual life after death.
There’s only one small disappointment: exhibits such as the bust of Pharaoh Djoser, who “opens the stone,” and the statue of Ka, the life body, are still in the old museum.
After three hours in the museum, our tour group meets in the atrium, and some of us say that we’re not tired at all. Where does this freshness come from—what invigorates us so much? It is the spaciousness of the museum, which is the size of 50 soccer fields. It is Shirin Brückner’s exhibition concept, which lets the exhibits speak for themselves and requires little text. And it is probably the interplay of pyramidal surfaces. Yes, the whole museum is a playground—we are continuously going up and down. When we study history and immerse ourselves in an era, connections to other times emerge, and our studies build bridges to new lands. This is how it is in the exhibition: each hall invites us to ascend and descend.
Interestingly, at the same time as the inauguration of the GEM—this great endeavor to bring the past into the present—a conference was being held not far away, northeast in Sekem, on how sustainability can be used to bring the future into the present. To help us on this path to the future, it is good to remember the ascent in the Egyptian Museum: you do not walk it alone, you are among gods.
Translation Laura Liska
Image View of the Pyramids of Giza from the Grand Egyptian Museum; Photo: W. Held
