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?
Finished in 2560 BC, the 
