National Museum of Egyptian Civilization

Cairo · Egypt

The Museum of Everything That Became a Tomb

Egypt built a museum to tell the story of an entire civilisation — seven thousand years of it, from flint tools to the present. The public knows it for one thing: the room where twenty dead kings lie in the dark.

In a black, hushed hall beneath the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Old Cairo lie the mummified bodies of Ramesses II, Hatshepsut, and eighteen other rulers of the New Kingdom — carried here in 2021 in a televised parade watched around the world.