NTIL THAT FIRST MORNING in Cairo, I
had always felt the art of ancient Egypt to be out
of reach. I could admire its scale, of course, and
its impassive beauty. Like most New Yorkers, I
had delighted at the sight of the Temple of
Dendur, all lit up in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, as I made my way home through Central
Park. But for art to really live, it cannot be mere
background. One has to find a way to
understand its spirit, to inhabit the world it
came from. To me, the culture of ancient Egypt
had always seemed so heavily caricatured, it
hardly felt real. And I’d struggled to get my
head around its mind-boggling antiquity. Was
it rea l ly possible t hat as ma ny cent ur ies
separate Alexander the Great from the
Pyramids of Giza as separate us from him?
But on that bright December morning, at the
new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, just west
of Cairo, something changed in me forever.
Finding myself in proximity to objects now
banal, now wondrous, the art of ancient Egypt
ceased to be remote or cartoonish. Here was
Tutankhamun’s papyrus chair; there were
ushabti, or funerary figurines, in various
enticing shades of blue. In another room were
slim-limbed funerary beds, their gold leaf still
intact. One had cat-faced Sekhmet on its posts,
the other the sky cow Mehet-Weret, with black
trefoils decorating its gold skin. It was all so
near, so intimate. Even the masked world of the
pharaohs did not seem out of reach once I’d just
stood inches away from Tutankhamun’s
underwear—a great linen thong stained
brown, not through any fault of his own, but by
33 centuries of oxidation.
The museum, which was built at a cost of
US$1.1 billion, is pharaonic. No other word
captures the 5,000-year-long Egyptian
tradition of building monuments on a scale that
defies all imagination. In modern times, Egypt
hasn’t lost its fondness for pharaonic scale.
There’s former president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s
dam at Aswan, which created one of the world’s
largest man-made lakes and forced the
relocation of the entire temple complexes at Abu
Simbel and Philae; a new, as-yet-unnamed,
capital city under construction some 45
kilometers east of Cairo; and now this grand
museum, slated to open in 2020. The building is
so vast t hat even t he 12-meter-ta l l colossus of