When the British archaeologist Howard Carter first peered into the long-sought tomb of Tutankhamen and was asked what he saw, he was famously said to have replied: “Wonderful things.”
For the first time since that excavation in 1922, all those “wonderful things” — more than 5,500 of them — are on display together in a newly envisioned exhibit that its curators hope will spark that same sense of awe.
The new Tutankhamen collection is the centerpiece of the Grand Egyptian Museum, a lavishly designed mega complex, with the Great Pyramids of Giza rising from the desert behind it. Decades in the making, the museum finally opened its doors to the public this week.
Its opening is a “gift from Egypt to the world,” Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, told the audience at the museum’s grand opening ceremony last week. And it holds an almost overwhelming array of remarkably preserved artifacts from an ancient civilization that has fascinated archaeologists, historians and museum visitors for centuries.
For Egypt’s government, the Grand Egyptian Museum has come to symbolize its ambitions to raise the country’s stature — and tourism revenues, providing a lifeline to Egypt’s battered economy.
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