With thousands of Egyptians queuing up every day to enter the newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) on the Pyramids Plateau since its official inauguration on 1 November, Monica Hanna, Egyptologist and dean of the School of Urban Heritage at the Arab Academy in Cairo, has rejoiced to watch a clear moment of connectivity between people and their heritage.
For Hanna, the GEM is not just an impressive museum that has fully opened after almost a quarter of a century of work and anticipation. It is a place where people can stand face to face with the heritage that they subscribe to and that is integrated into their own identity.
“What I have seen in the GEM is the reflection of people’s genuine interest to learn more about their heritage,” Hanna said. She declined to reduce this to a consequence of the media hype surrounding the opening of the GEM.
“The road towards the opening of the GEM has been building up for over 20 years, and there was certainly a sense of anticipation,” Hanna said. However, she argued that this is not the only way to read the presence of the large crowds at the GEM, along with those who have been visiting the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square in Cairo, or, for that matter, the Pyramids Plateau.
“There is much more to it than that,” she argued. Hanna is convinced that the Egyptian association with heritage is real and profound, and it has just needed the right click to demonstrate itself fully and forcefully.
While declining to oversimplify, Hanna is firm in her belief that there are elements of ancient Egypt that have survived the centuries in the habits and practices of Egyptians today. “It is there as a layer for sure, and it has been joined by subsequent layers throughout the subsequent eras of history,” she argued.
Dur to the “mistaken assumption” that Egyptians are not interested in the history of ancient Egypt, there has never been a dedicated attempt to open its doors to the wider public, she said. “It was assumed that this history is essentially of interest to foreigners, and this is not only a wrong assumption, but it is also unfair and unhelpful because it has led to policies that do not allow the necessary connectivity between the people and their heritage,” she added.
She said that the assumption that the heritage of ancient Egypt is “something for foreigners” had a colonial basis. This is due to the sad fact that Egyptians were excluded from the early excavations in the 19th century, which were deliberately monopolised by the colonial presence in Egypt.
“They deliberately kept Egyptians at arm’s length because they wanted to control the narrative,” Hanna said. She added that the trafficking of excavated pieces was something that some foreign excavators also got involved in, including by some top names like Howard Carter, whose name is closely associated with the tomb of the ancient Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamun discovered in 1922.
Hanna credits the nationalism that came with the 1919 Revolution and that called for an end to the British occupation of Egypt and the firm positions of Saad Zaghloul, the face of the revolution, and Morcos Hanna Pasha, the minister of public works at the time, with stopping Carter from taking pieces from the tomb of Tutankhamun — all of which are now on display in the GEM.
For Hanna, antiquities trafficking is not just about money, but it is also about the control of the narrative. This attempt at control, she added, was also not unsuccessful since modern Egyptology was born as a science during the time of colonialism. For far too many years, she stated, most of the knowledge produced in Egyptology had been by Europeans.
“Today, this is still the case to a great extent,” she said. The assumption that Egyptology is something by and for foreigners, she added, has been deliberately passed on to Egyptians. “It is very unfortunate, but today with the opening of the GEM, we see that there is a lot of potential for this assumption to be reversed,” she said.
POTENTIAL OF THE GEM: The GEM has the potential to keep the public interested in Egyptology, “especially if information is made easily accessible for visiting Egyptians.”
“This requires special free-entry days and free access to GEM guides for school and university students,” she said.
Just a few days after the opening of the GEM, Hanna was infuriated by the decision of the authorities to put a quota on the number of Egyptians versus the number of foreigners who can enter the museum on specific days. On these days, 80 per cent of the visitors to the GEM will be foreigners and only 20 per cent will be Egyptians.
This, she said, is a mistake and not just regarding the right of access to cultural and heritage sites for Egyptians in Egypt. It also supports the idea that Egyptology is something designed to meet the interest of foreigners.
“This is precisely what we should not be tolerating, because this is certainly our heritage, and we can work on it just as well as anyone else — if not better, actually, given our own understanding of and sensitivity to its multi-layered history.”
Hanna lobbied against this move and expressed her support for attempts to reverse what she qualified as “an unbecoming mistake”.
“It goes against the right of owning our own heritage, and it also goes against the concept of accessibility to all cultural sites for all Egyptians,” she said.
The connection between Egyptians and their history and heritage is the best way to decolonise Egyptology, Hanna said. Earlier this year, the Arabic translation of her book The Future of Egyptology was published by Diwan Publishing House, and the core argument of this is that there needs to be an end to the European, in other words colonial, monopoly of Egyptology.
The time has come, Hanna said, to remove the heavy colonial imprint from the Egyptology that has been put together since the 19th century after the French Expedition to Egypt and with the subsequent British occupation of the country.
“We need to understand our past the way it was and not the way it is presented to us as being,” she stated.
Decolonising Egyptology and making it relevant to ordinary Egyptians is not an easy task, however, especially owing to the unattractive way that history is sometimes taught to school students. The relevant curricula, Hanna argued, are deliberately designed for students who wish to memorise the content of textbooks for exams and not to stimulate real interest.
“This is not the way that Egyptology, or history and heritage at large, should be offered to students,” Hanna said. “They should be able to learn about their heritage in an appealing and interconnective way, including by site-seeing assignments to be conducted by schools free of charge.”
Moreover, Hanna said that the history and heritage curricula need to be designed with a regional approach to help sightseeing exercises as part of the educational process. This, she explained, would mean that while all students would all be introduced to the basics, children in Luxor, for example, would learn about the nearby Valley of the Kings.
“This is because those living in Luxor could go on an assignment with their teacher to the valley, which will then directly connect them to their heritage.”
Hanna said that the interest that Egyptians of all backgrounds expressed in the opening of the GEM is a clear sign that curiosity is there and that it needs to be satisfied in the right way.
“This is not just about museums and temples, although these are important,” she said. “It is also about providing interesting content, including for children of a very young age.”
Meanwhile, Hanna insisted that the opening of the GEM should be a moment when academics and researchers should have more access for proper research. “If we really want to decolonise Egyptology, we should allow keen Egyptian researchers to work at the GEM,” she said.
“Research is essential, obviously, but it is something that needs grants and funds,” she said. While some researchers can access funds through foreign entities with an interest in promoting Egyptology, Hanna argued that it is always best if funds for research can be allocated through national bodies in order to avoid any foreign imprint on the research itself, inevitable if the funds are made available by foreign bodies.
Expanding opportunities for Egyptian researchers, Hanna argued, is also necessary to lift the colonial imprint that marks several museums in Egypt. Egyptians, she added, do not want to see their own history through the eyes of foreigners. She insisted that there should be wider access to museums to allow for the generation of knowledge outside any European monopoly.
“We should not just be talking about the need to revamp the curriculum on history and heritage. We need to revamp the concepts behind the way this history was written and the heritage presented,” she said.
If the state is too stretched to provide the necessary funds, she added, then it might consider pursuing a private-public-partnership approach to find them.
“We have to find a way to secure greater connections with heritage, and we have to be dedicated to it,” Hanna said. The GEM, she added, is an opportunity that should not be missed.
“There is so much that could be done. Schools could have multiple trips to the GEM that are designed according to several approaches — one could be thematic, the following could be chronological, and so on,” she said.
“I think there is an attempt to do a few interesting things on the part of the GEM administration, and we should see how these are executed.”
OUTSIDE THE GEM: Meanwhile, Hanna argued that the GEM should not be the sole venue for such activities.
She said that she wanted to see the Rosetta Stone brought back to Egypt, not to be displayed in the GEM but to be taken to its “hometown” of Rosetta in the Nile Delta, where it belongs and where it could be displayed to the general public.
Hanna’s activism goes a long way beyond lobbying to regain the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum and the Nefertiti Bust from the Neues Museum in Berlin, however. The list is long of the items she wants to bring back to Egypt from their current Western venues.
However, she is aware that she cannot bring back pieces that were either smuggled out of the country or offered by a leader like Mohamed Ali to some foreign excavator or politician. For Hanna, the idea is to focus on certain unique pieces that went astray.
Again, she stresses that the focus is not to expand the number of items that are displayed at the GEM. Ultimately, she said, the GEM should not take attention away from other museums across the country, including the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, which has one of the world’s best laboratories for restoration.
The GEM, she said, should be part of a larger heritage system that should be regulated by an overarching philosophy that goes beyond the false assumption that history is mainly there for tourists in Egypt. “Obviously, tourism is essential, but it is not the single purpose that the heritage scheme should aim at,” she said.
This new philosophy of heritage should address all the relevant aspects, from school curricula to media programmes, accessibility, research, restoration, and even excavation. “Monuments are certainly part of this, but they are not the only part because there is also the immaterial heritage, for example,” she said.
“We need to end the forced disconnect between the many elements of heritage, and we need to end the disconnect between history and the present,” Hanna said. “This superimposed separation between [past and present] is a colonial idea that we should not subscribe to,” she stated.
In 1952, Hanna recalled, Egypt took over administrative control of its monuments to end the colonial control of what had previously been the Maslahat Al-Athar, or Antiquities Organisation. However, the end of foreign administration did not come with the end of the colonial ideas that had created many false assumptions, including that ancient Egypt is just about monuments and mummies.
The GEM, she argued, is an opportunity for people to learn more about ancient Egypt and to learn about Egyptian heritage at large. The euphoria surrounding the opening of the GEM after a long wait, she added, is also a moment to rethink policies related to heritage preservation and promotion in a way that is designed to avoid possible losses either by demolition or by the overseas exhibiting of unique pieces.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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