OF DREAMS, DUST AND DESTRUCTION

EGYPT'S GRAND MUSEUM IS FINALLY OPEN AND AUTHORITIES CLAIM ANCIENT ARTEFACTS ARE NOW SAFE FROM CORRUPTION AND LOOTING

- STORY: ERIKA SOLOMON AND RANIA KHALED / NYT

Tutankhamen's coffin at the Grand Egyptian Museum.

When the British archaeologist Howard Carter first peered into the long-sought tomb of Tutankhamen and was asked what he saw, he was famously said to have replied: "Wonderful things.

For the first time since that excavation in 1922, all those "wonderful things" — more than 5,500 of them — are on display together in a newly envisioned exhibit that its curators hope will spark that same sense of awe.

The new Tutankhamen collection is the centrepiece of the Grand Egyptian Museum, a lavishly designed mega complex, with the Great Pyramids of Giza rising from the desert behind it. Decades in the making, the museum finally opened its doors to the public this month.

Its opening is a "gift from Egypt to the world", President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi told the audience at the museum's grand opening ceremony on Nov 1. And it holds an almost overwhelming array of remarkably preserved artefacts from an ancient civilisation that has fascinated archaeologists, historians and museum visitors for centuries.

For Egypt's government, the Grand Egyptian Museum has come to symbolise its ambitions to raise the country's stature and tourism revenues, providing a lifeline to Egypt's battered economy.

And for many Egyptians, the state-of-the art museum is seen as a stage from which to renew demands that Egypt's most iconic antiquities belong in their homeland - not the marble halls of European museums.

"The old arguments against return are crumbling," said Monica Hanna, a leading Egyptologist based in Cairo. The new museum, she argued, was a signal to the world: "Egypt possesses the capacity, the will and the world-class facilities to house its own heritage."

With so many hopes riding on the museum, its creators were ambitious - despite more than 20 years of delays amid a revolution and counterrevolution, a pandemic and economic crises.