Grand Egyptian Museum

The Grand Egyptian Museum is the flex a five-thousand-year-old civilisation was owed: the largest archaeological museum on earth, two decades and a billion-plus dollars in the making, planted two kilometres from the pyramids with a façade of translucent alabaster and a design that aligns its sightlines directly onto Khufu's tomb — the first thing you see past the colossi is the reason for everything. The welcome is an 11-metre, 83-tonne granite Ramses II filling the atrium (he used to direct traffic outside Cairo's railway station; retirement suits him), and the six-storey Grand Staircase ascends through a parade of statuary to a window where the pyramids themselves complete the collection.

The heart of the museum is the payoff archaeology waited a century for: Tutankhamun's complete tomb treasure — all 5,000-plus objects, together for the first time since Howard Carter opened the tomb in 1922 — the gold mask, the nested shrines, the chariots, the sandals, the trumpets, the toys from a pharaoh's childhood, staged as the single greatest exhibition of one moment ever assembled. Around it, twelve main galleries run Egypt from prehistory to Rome by era and theme, and the Solar Boat — Khufu's 4,500-year-old cedar ship, moved from its shed at Giza — floats in its own wing as the world's oldest large vessel. The old Tahrir museum downtown remains open and remains wonderful in its cluttered Victorian way (the royal mummies moved to the NMEC in Fustat); the GEM is not its replacement so much as the civilisation's new front door.

Craft: it is enormous — the Tut galleries plus the Grand Staircase and two chosen galleries is the sane single visit, three to four hours — and timed tickets plus the skip-the-line products beat a queue that has become a Giza fixture. Mornings pair naturally with an afternoon plateau visit (or the reverse, museum in the heat of the day — the architecture is air-conditioned mercy); the guided-tour products earn their keep in the Tut halls, where the object density defeats casual reading. The restaurant terraces frame the pyramids for lunch, and the evening hours (select days) offer the rare luxury of Tutankhamun in near-privacy. Book ahead; the world waited twenty years and shows up accordingly.