Egypt's effort to preserve its antiquities began in 1835 with a modest museum near the Ezbekieh Garden. What followed was decades of upheaval. Muhammad Ali Pasha's death in 1849 left the collection vulnerable to antiquities dealers, and the holdings shrank until they fit in a single hall of the Cairo Citadel. In 1855, Khedive Abbas I gave the entire contents of that hall to Archduke Maximilian of Austria as a diplomatic gift; those objects now reside in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. Auguste Mariette established a new museum at Boulaq in 1858, but an 1878 Nile flood damaged the building. The collection then moved to a palace in Giza. Finally, in 1902, the artifacts were transferred to the purpose-built museum on Tahrir Square, carried by five thousand wooden carts and two trains making nineteen round trips between Giza and the new site. The first shipment alone included forty-eight stone coffins weighing over a thousand tons.

The museum's two floors follow a logic that rewards patience. On the ground floor, large-scale stone works are arranged chronologically in a clockwise circuit, from pre-dynastic artifacts through the Greco-Roman period. Here you find the Narmer Palette, the ceremonial slab that records the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BCE, and the statue of Khafre Enthroned, carved from a single block of diorite with the falcon god Horus spreading wings behind the pharaoh's head. Upstairs, smaller treasures fill the rooms: papyri in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and ancient Egyptian; coins of gold, silver, and bronze spanning Egyptian, Roman, and Islamic mints. Until 2021, the royal mummy halls allowed visitors to stand face to face with the preserved remains of New Kingdom pharaohs. Those mummies have since moved to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in a spectacular televised procession.

On 28 January 2011, as protests against President Hosni Mubarak engulfed Tahrir Square, the museum became collateral damage. Unidentified individuals broke in, stealing 54 artifacts and destroying two mummies. A third mummy was damaged by fire. Zahi Hawass, then director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the press: "My heart is broken and my blood is boiling." The military cordoned the building, but reports emerged that the museum grounds had been used to detain and abuse protesters. Twenty-five of the stolen objects were found on the museum grounds; others were recovered over the following years. In September 2013, the museum displayed restored artifacts in an exhibition titled "Damaged and Restored," including two gilded cedar-wood statues of Tutankhamun and a polychrome glass vase. The scars of that week became part of the museum's story, a reminder that antiquities and politics have never been separable in Egypt.

Decades of pollution and heavy traffic had dulled the building's appearance by the time a major renovation began in 2006. The German Foreign Ministry funded studies, and the International Environmental Quality Association helped execute a rehabilitation plan that restored the original wall colors using 257 preserved design panels from the museum's library. Workers replaced window glass with UV-protective panes to shield artifacts from sunlight, restored the original ventilation system, and upgraded the lighting to enable nighttime visits beginning in 2016. The final phase, inaugurated in November 2018, reorganized the display layout and reintroduced collections of Yuya and Thuya on the upper floor. Oversight for the artifact redistribution came from directors of the museums of Turin, the Louvre, and Berlin, lending the renovation an international imprimatur.

The Egyptian Museum's future is bound up with the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, a massive new facility that has been receiving the Tahrir collection's most famous items, including all of Tutankhamun's tomb artifacts. The museum on the square will not close, but its identity is shifting. In 2004, it appointed its first female director general, Wafaa El Saddik. Its library holds over 50,000 books on ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern archaeology, including rare works such as the Description de l'Egypte. And the building itself, registered as a heritage site since 1983, is now as much an artifact as anything it contains. Mariette, who spent decades fighting for Egyptian antiquities, is buried in the museum garden, in accordance with his wish to rest among the objects he spent his life collecting. The pharaohs may be moving across town, but their first guardian stays.