After two years of construction, the Grand Egyptian Museum was inaugurated earlier this month in a ceremony attended by world leaders, but crowd control did not go smoothly.
Days after the museum opened on November 4, images emerged on social media showing thousands of frustrated visitors flocking to the nearby Giza plateau after being denied entry. Ahmed Ghoneim, the museum’s chief executive, said in a televised statement on Friday that more than 27,000 tickets had been sold, far exceeding the daily limit of 20,000, and pledged to reassess the policy that led to Cairo’s brief chaos.
Tickets can currently be booked on online platforms and at physical kiosks around the Egyptian capital, the same system that led to oversubscription on Friday. Goneim said the museum will move to an online-only reservation system starting next month. He added that it was difficult for management to accurately estimate visitor numbers, given the continued increase in the number of people entering and exiting the museum at any one time.
A week later, the museum was attacked by Egyptians because they were unable to obtain tickets for Sunday and Monday. Claims circulating online that the museum reserves a disproportionately high proportion of admissions for foreigners at the expense of locals – an alleged ratio of 80 to 20 – were dismissed by Ghonim as “rumors.” He said the museum was developing a strategy to ensure that a certain proportion of tickets on any given day were allocated to Egyptians and foreign visitors, a measure aimed at mitigating crowd control issues before they had a chance to escalate. The ratio would vary with the seasons, but “never would be more than 60-40” in any group, he said.
According to Ghonem, the museum welcomed 15,200 visitors that fateful Friday, 56 percent of whom were Egyptians, which he took as evidence that locals were not left out.
But not everyone is convinced. nation Reports say Freddie El Bayady, a Social Democratic MP and an outspoken critic of government policies, submitted a formal request to abolish ticket quotas on Saturday. “How is it possible that the citizens of this land cannot at the same time find a place where foreigners can enter freely?” he wrote, claiming that “a similar ticketing system does not exist in any museum in the world”.
“The heritage of our motherland is not a commodity,” the congressman said. “Egyptians’ rights in their land are non-negotiable.”
The long-awaited opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), a $1 billion project, in November was attended by dozens of foreign leaders and dignitaries. The museum now ranks among the largest museums in the world, with a 968,000-square-foot facility housing collections spanning approximately 7,000 years of history; an 80,000-square-foot gallery dedicated to displaying all 5,600 grave objects from King Tut’s tomb.
