Early museums and relocations The Egyptian government established a museum in 1835 near the
Ezbekieh Garden. Youssef Diaa Effendi, the Director of the
Antiquities Department, began inspecting the antiquities of Middle
Egypt shortly after assuming his position, focusing on those discovered by farmers. In 1848,
Muhammad Ali Pasha assigned Linan Bek, the Minister of Education, to compile a report on archaeological sites and send artifacts to the Egyptian Museum. However, this effort was not successful due to the death of Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1849, followed by a period of instability. The trade in antiquities resurfaced, and the collection housed in the museum established in
Azbakeya began to shrink until it was transferred to a single hall in the
Cairo Citadel. The situation worsened when
Khedive Abbas I donated the entire contents of this hall to
Archduke Maximilian of Austria during his visit to the citadel in 1855; these are now in the
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Following the foundation of the new Antiquities Department under the direction of
Auguste Mariette, a new museum was established in 1858 at
Boulaq in a former warehouse on the riverbank. Mariette considered the Boulaq Museum a temporary location, and after the building was damaged in an 1878 Nile flood, he advocated for a permanent museum with greater capacity, situated away from the flood path. After Mariette's death, he was succeeded by
Gaston Maspero, who attempted to move the
museum from
Boulaq but was unsuccessful. By 1889, the building was overcrowded, with no available rooms for more artifacts in either the exhibition halls or storage areas. Artifacts discovered during excavations were often left for long periods in boats in Upper Egypt.
Khedive Ismail offered one of his palaces in
Giza, the location of the present-day zoo, to serve as the new museum. Between the summer and the end of 1889, all the artifacts were moved from the Boulaq Museum to Giza, and the artifacts were reorganized in the new museum by the scholar De Morgan, who served as the museum's director. From 1897 to 1899, Loret succeeded De Morgan, but Maspero returned to manage the museum from 1899 to 1914. The artifacts remained there until 1902 when they were moved again to the current museum in
Tahrir Square, built by the
Italian company of Giuseppe Garozzo and Francesco Zaffrani to a design by the
French architect Marcel Dourgnon.
Construction and opening The architectural design of the museum was created by the French architect Marcel Dournon in 1897, to be located in the northern area of
Tahrir Square (formerly Ismailia Square), along the British Army barracks in Cairo near
Qasr El-Nil. The foundation stone was laid on 1 April 1897, in the presence of
Khedive Abbas Hilmi II, the Prime Minister, and all his cabinet members. The project was completed by the German architect Hermann Grabe. In November 1903, the Antiquities Department appointed the Italian architect Alessandro Parazenti, who had received the keys to the museum on 9 March 1902, and began transferring the archaeological collections from
Khedive Ismail's palace in Giza to the new museum. This operation involved the use of five thousand wooden carts, while large artifacts were transported by two trains, making about nineteen round trips between Giza and Qasr El-Nil. The first shipment carried approximately forty-eight stone coffins, weighing over a thousand tons in total. The transfer was completed by 13 July 1902, and Mariette's tomb was moved to the museum garden in accordance with his wish to be buried among the artifacts he had spent much of his life collecting. The Egyptian Museum was officially opened on 15 November 1902. The new museum adopted an exhibition style based on a gradual arrangement of halls, without allocating rooms for periods of turmoil, as they were considered historically insignificant. The museum's artifacts were categorised by theme; for architectural reasons, large statues were placed on the ground floor, while funerary items were displayed on the first floor in chronological order. Each day, new artifacts were arranged and displayed by theme in various rooms. The museum became the only one in the world so filled with artifacts that it resembled a storage facility. When asked about this, Maspero replied that the Egyptian Museum was a reflection of a pharaonic tomb or temple, where every part of the space was used to display paintings or hieroglyphic inscriptions. In 2004, the museum appointed
Wafaa El Saddik as the first female director general. In the
Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the museum was broken into and reportedly used as a torture site, with protestors forcibly detained and allegedly abused, according to reports, videos, and eyewitness accounts. Activists state that "men were being tortured with electric shocks, whips and wires," and "women were tied to fences and trees." Singer and activist
Ramy Essam was among those detained and tortured. During this time, two mummies were destroyed, a third was damaged by fire, several artifacts were damaged, and 54 objects were stolen. Twenty-five of the missing objects were found soon after on the grounds of the museum. Among these were six of seven
Ushabtis of Yuya, and a statuette recovered in 2014; one shabti remains missing. The restored artifacts were displayed in September 2013 in an exhibition titled "Damaged and Restored". Among these artefacts were two statues of King
Tutankhamun made of cedar wood and covered with gold, a statue of King
Akhenaten,
Ushabti statues that belonged to the Nubian kings, a mummy of a child that was unwrapped due to its bandages being burned, and a small polychrome glass vase. File:Tutankhamon Statue harpooning before 2011 damage.jpg|Statue of Tutankhamun harpooning on a reed float before it was damaged in the 2011 revolution File:Statue of Tutankhamun on a reed float00 (21) (cropped).jpg|The same statue after damage and subsequent restoration. The object in its left hand is now gone. File:Menkaret.jpg|alt=Gilded wooden statue showing Tutankhamun being carried by a goddess figure|Gilded wooden statue of
Tutankhamun being carried by the goddess Menkeret. It was looted during the
25 January 2011 Revolution and has been missing since. == Museum development ==