Winter in Egypt, 2025 - We Visit the Grand Egyptian Museum, Part I (and play with Artificial Intelligence)

Good News! The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) will finally have a grand opening on July 3rd, 2025. At least that was the promise as of late February.

We made our second tour of the partially open museum on February 9th while rumors of the grand opening date were just beginning to circulate in Cairo.  Will King Tut's treasures actually be transferred to their new home by then? We shall see.

Meanwhile, as of October, 2024, the GEM is open with its twelve "main galleries" now available to the public versus only the grand staircase that was accessible last year. 

For many years, we have been good friends with our neighbors across the hall at our apartment in Giza.  They have moved out to the eastern suburbs where we visited with them this year.  Their two sons Yusef and Omar are now fully grown and invited us to go along with them on their first visit to GEM. 

We toured the GEM last year when only the main floor lobby and grand staircase were open.  This year a number of the galleries were open, although the King Tut treasures remained at the old Egyptian Museum at Tahrir Square, despite what one might think after reading this article in Egypt Today.

 

We arrived at the huge building just past noon on a sunny February day and paused just inside to get a picture near the pond in front of the well-known statue of Ramses II.

  

 

I didn't bring a camera since last year cameras were not allowed inside.  Of course, cell phones are allowed.  It turns out that cameras were allowed inside this year - (check the rules at the time of your visit!) and so my museum camera, with the low-light f1.8 lens, didn't make it inside.  Photo quality suffered quite a bit as a result. It's a long walk from the parking lot to the ticket counter. 

We had a very nice tour of the facility and were very pleased by what we found.  As I began putting this blog post together, I put the AI robot, ChatGPT, to work on a couple of my pictures and am sharing the results in this post.  

There are three basic approaches to touring the museum.  There is far too much to just browse the whole collection unless you have several days.

• Use a guide (highly recommended for first time visitors - (Try this one)
• Pick up an audio museum guide in the lobby.
• Just wing it.
  

We took the latter approach since we are quite familiar with the history after twenty years of visiting the country and its many museums. 

We began by climbing the Grand Staircase.  A number of galleries are open along the way but we chose to go all the way to the top before moving into the galleries.  There is an escalator along one side since this is quite a long climb.

 

We made a stop at the first statue.  In spite of the signage being quite good in this museum, I somehow missed getting a picture of any label on this statue.  As I began this blog post, I thought this might be a good chance to try out the AI chatbot, ChatGPT, that I have been playing with to identify the statue based on the cartouches at the base.  I uploaded a cropped picture of the base.  Let's see how it did.

 

That's quite good.  The AI bot didn't just tell us "Ramses II".  It provided a little context.

Our next stop was at this statue of Akhenaten, frequently identified as the father of monotheism.

 Museums are notoriously difficult places to photograph. Lighting that provides helpful highlighting for the visitor raises holy hell with exposure and the extreme range of light to dark is challenging, even for an HDR camera which I don't have.  I usually fiddle around with Photoshop to try and get something halfway respectable.

Maybe ChatGPT could do something for us.  I gave it this image along with these instructions:

"Please improve the lighting in this photo of the head of Akhenaton. Also add a cartouche and English translation to the base."

The lighting came out very, very yellowish but I was able to fix that with Photoshop.  Of course, I clumsily misspelled Akhenaten's name and didn't notice it.  So, here's the final result, side by side.  What do you think?  The AI bot eliminated the background figures on its own.

ChatGPT also eliminated most of the serpent on the forehead, added a pharaoh's beard, patched up the bottom of the statue and made a better proportion for the base versus the head.  Perhaps it is a bit too smart for its own good?  Would you still recognize it as Akhenaten?

Reaching another resting point on the climb, we stopped at this delightful stella.  I can never resist photographing a big piece of granite, sandstone or basalt with hieroglyphics on it.

Let's see what ChatGPT can tell us about this cartouche.

Whoa!  That's just plain wrong.  We already know what Ramses II cartouches look like from our previous question.  Well, ChatGPT answers always have that warning at the bottom: "ChatGPT can make mistakes"

That is one of the biggest drawbacks to AI bots at present.  They can hallucinate and seldom seem to ever admit, "I don't know."  Perhaps ChatGPT has learned to always guess "Ramses II" for cartouches - it is frequently correct.

I forwarded the same cartouche picture via Whatsapp to our good friend, Rashid, in Cairo who can read hieroglyphics and he quickly replied with "Senusret", along with a picture.  Real intelligence beats the artificial kind once again.

So, I'll just put ChatGPT aside for now unless we need to enhance some photos.

On the next level, we find the Archeological Study for serious students of Egyptology; I haven't yet checked to see what might be of interest in there.  Also on this level is a dandy stella and the Tut gallery, just waiting for the Tut goods to arrive some day.

  

 

I worry about the placement of the stella.  I can imagine someone carefully studying it from the stairs side, stepping backward and going head over heels down the stairway.  Here is another larger view with some documentation of the stella.  It is an Akhenaten stella very reminiscent of the boundary stella that we saw last year at Amarna near Minya. This one comes from the nearby Cairo suburb of Heliopolis, an area described in this previous post.

 

Just a few more levels to go until we reach the top!  First we pass the Greek-looking god of fertility and the underworld, Serapis, and an excellent pyramid cap recovered from the nearby Saqqara area.

  

 

The reward at the top of the staircase is a spectacular view of the Giza Pyramids.

 

For more pictures see this Flickr Album.