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.
Photography is often a case of having to wait for that perfect shot, as Vit Hassan discovered when visiting Meroe. The golden sands of the desert against the ancient Nubian pyramids gave the perfect backdrop, and after taking his photograph, Vit Hassan took the one Heritage Key features ten minutes later as the shadows set into the landscape, and the scenery became more defined.
The Sahara desert covers the length of Egypt, down to the site of the city of Meroe, near the modern day border with Sudan aside the River Nile. Meroe intrigues many archaeologists for the sense of mystery surrounding it - a city where little is known about the people who lived there or why they left, just simply disappearing.
