Giza

Cairo · Egypt

The House Whose Famous Guests All Moved Out

When Tutankhamun's mask left Cairo's Egyptian Museum for the Grand Egyptian Museum, it took the crowds with it — but not the collection. What remains in the old building on Tahrir Square turns out to be a stranger and more interesting museum than the one that emptied.

For most of a century, the golden mask of Tutankhamun stood behind glass on the upper floor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In October 2025 it was driven out to Giza, and it was not the only thing to go: the royal mummies, the whole Tutankhamun collection, tens of thousands of objects have left the old museum for Egypt's gleaming new institutions.

Cairo · Egypt

The Museum That Reflects Everything, Including You

How the world's largest single-civilisation museum gathers a nation's heritage, national story, tourism economy and repatriation claims under one reflective roof — and what those mirrored surfaces quietly ask of everyone who walks in.

Around the colossus of Ramses II, shallow pools mirror the floor so exactly that visitors keep stepping in. It is a small, faintly comic thing — and a way into a much larger question about the Grand Egyptian Museum. A civilisation is gathered here and made whole, while its three most famous faces stay abroad. A home for a nation's heritage opens, and the nation queues outside it. A monument to Egyptian sovereignty rises, financed largely from Tokyo.

Famous Restoration Controversies

Nine public disputes, chosen for a named conservation reason: overcleaning, amateur work, reconstruction ethics or missing records

Restoration fights are arguments about what a treatment removed, added or failed to record. This list sets selection criteria first, then walks nine documented cases from the Sistine Chapel and the National Gallery to Borja, Angkor Wat and Tutankhamun’s mask, with dates and 2026 locations checked against institutional sources.

Ancient Egyptian Art

Images built to work for gods, kings and the dead: canon, craft and change along the Nile across nearly three millennia.

Ancient Egyptian art was rarely made for the museum wall alone. This period survey explains why statues and reliefs functioned as cult tools, how a stable visual canon held for centuries, where Old, Middle and New Kingdom styles diverge, and which collections still make those differences visible today.

Marrakech · Morocco

Filmed, but Not Recorded: The Arab World’s Missing Film Locations

Wikidata knows Gladiator was filmed in Morocco. It doesn’t know where.

Ouarzazate is the second most filmed place in the Middle East and North Africa, yet 25 of its 27 productions are recorded only in Wikipedia prose. We compared filming records worldwide and found that in the Arab world, Wikidata usually knows the country but not the place.

Baghdad · Iraq

One Thousand and One Nights as a Visual Network

The book that taught Europe to picture the East arrived with no pictures at all. Three centuries of illustrators — Dutch, Egyptian, Persian, French, German, Iraqi — each gave it a face, and every face was a self-portrait.

Open Galland's Thousand and One Nights, the edition that conquered Europe, and there is nothing to look at: no genie, no lamp, not one illustration. The most visually imagined book in the world began blind — and because its text was never fixed either, no picture of it could ever be a copy.