Mid-2012 was confirmed last week as the projected point of opening for the Grand Egyptian Museum, as pen was put to paper on a deal between the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and engineering firms Hill International and EHAF Consulting Engineers to commence work on stage three of Egypt’s new cultural mecca.
Egyptian culture minister Farouk Hosni looked on as Dr Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the SCA, and Raouf Ghali, board chairman of Hill International, signed the deal. Hosni stated that it will take 26 months to complete the massive building project, in the desert west of Cairo at Giza, just two kilometres from the pyramids.
The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) is a long-planned new central museum complex for Cairo and Egypt, intended to replace the Egyptian Museum - founded in 1902 - as the main venue for the country's abundant heritage treasures. It'll be sited on 50 hectares of land in Giza, as a core part of a new master plan for the plateau.
The GEM project began as far back as 1992, but has been slow in coming to fruition - the foundation stone was only laid a decade later, and the museum isn't expected to be opened until as early as mid-2012. It'll be a massive structure once completed - shaped like a chamfered triangle, with a stone roof, the GEM will boast 100,000 square metres of floor space – the size of 11 football pitches – with provision for up to 100,000 artefacts at full capacity. It's expected to cost in the region of $550 million.
Finished in 2560 BC, the Great Pyramid of Giza took 20 years to build. 3,000 years on, it doesn’t look like major Egyptian construction projects have hurried up any.
It was recently announced that the opening date for the Grand Egyptian Museum – the massive centerpiece attraction of the epic new vision for the Giza plateau, two and a half kilometres from the pyramids – has been pushed back to 2013, after the latest in a long-running series of delays for the building. The project was officially commenced in 1992, which means that even if the GEM does open on schedule now, it will itself have taken at least a full 20 years to finally come to fruition. History never lacks a sense of irony, does it?
Submitted by Roger Kean on Tue, 01/19/2010 - 20:27
Review Rating:
8
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This is a wonderful conceit of a book – as the title suggests, a tourist’s guide to the Egypt of Ramses II. Charlotte Booth's text slides carefully between the kind of advice that a traveller of the period would have found useful and the kind of information which enlightens the modern tourist about the physical marvels of ancient Egypt while explaining every aspect of the ancient culture – at least up until 1200 BC.
A good holiday package tour guide should give the traveller a useful overview of essentials, such as where to stay, where to enjoy the local cuisine (and what to expect on your plate), medical health care (in case you get Egyptian tummy from the food), places of interest to visit and what to look for when you get there, and the best times to visit Egypt (avoid the summer floods when most temples are under water). This guide advises on the kind of currency to take with you: "it is recommended you … have plenty of papyrus to bargain with … and perhaps have a couple of goats to hand as well". For the modern tourist, a supply of papyrus is no problem, as anyone who’s ever visited Egypt will well know!
Gustave Flaubert - the author of 'Madame Bovary' - travelled through Egypt from October 1849 to July 1850. Together with his friend and photographer Maxime Du Camp he journeyed from Alexandria in the North to Sudan in the South and back. This journey is the focus of the exhibition 'Het Egypte van Gustave Flaubert' (Gustave Flaubert's Egypt), which runs at the RMO in Holland until April 4th 2010. The expo follows the famous French writer on his journey through Egypt and takes its visitors from the amazing pyramids at Giza and the sanctuaries at Luxor to the gigantic pharaonic statues at Abu Simbel in the deep south.
There is exciting news breaking right now in Egypt. An archaeological team led by Dr. Zahi Hawass has discovered several new tombs that belong to the workers who built the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre.
“This is the first time to uncover tombs like the ones that were found during the 1990’s, which belong to the late 4th and 5th Dynasties (2649-2374 BC),” said Dr. Hawass in the press release.
When we think of Giza we tend to think of the Giza Pyramids. However, while the pyramids were under construction, there was an extensive city to the south that supported the workers. It included houses, bakeries, magazines and a hypostyle hall (See the video below, in which Mark Lehner descibes his work researching this area).
There are hundreds of tourist sites and experiences that are too crowded, too over-developed or too expensive. They’re the places we always see on TV or as backdrops in movies, or places we’ve read about in books or seen on the covers of travel magazines; it’s always sunny in the photos, and the sites always look pleasant and amazing to visit. But are they?
It’s a question publisher Dorling Kindersley has tackled head-on in The Road Less Travelled: 1,000 Amazing Places Off the Tourist Trail, a book that controversially picks the world’s top tourist sites – and then casts them effortlessly aside in favour of less publicised places. Instead of visiting the Pyramids of Giza, with their “unbroken procession of tourist buses”, the book’s authors say tourists should head to the pyramids of Meroe in Sudan, where they can “have the tombs all to themselves, with little more accompaniment than the sound of the desert wind in heir ears”.
As with all Joyce Tyldesley books The Pharaohs is well written and researched. It is also incredibly easy to read, thanks to the inclusion of numerous text boxes and quotes from contemporary texts. However, as with most coffee table books, it is not evenly weighted in regards to the history it cover. The PR blurb states that the book narrates "the stories of 30 dynasties”, which it does, but with a greater focus on the New Kingdom; a full 79 pages on dynasties 18 and 19, with the inevitable chapter on Akhenaten.
Mid-2012 was confirmed last week as the projected point of opening for the 
Finished in 2560 BC, the 
Gustave Flaubert - the author of 'Madame Bovary' - travelled through Egypt from October 1849 to July 1850. Together with his friend and photographer Maxime Du Camp he journeyed from Alexandria in the North to Sudan in the South and back. This journey is the focus of the exhibition 'Het Egypte van Gustave Flaubert' (Gustave Flaubert's Egypt), which runs at the RMO in Holland until April 4th 2010. The expo follows the famous French writer on his journey through Egypt and takes its visitors from the amazing 
There is exciting news breaking right now in Egypt. An archaeological team led by 
