GEM (Grand Egyptian Museum): What to Expect from This Museum?

By Glênio S Guedes ( attorney )

"He who does not know his Past cannot make the best of his Present and Future, for it is from the Past that we learn."

— Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan

The Museum as a Semiotic Text

The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), located next to the Giza Necropolis, is not merely the largest archaeological museum in the world: it must be read as a cultural text, a system of signs that articulates memory, identity, and power. Each hall, showcase, and artifact is an utterance that addresses the visitor not only to inform but also to persuade, to move, and to engage.

Covering more than 480,000 square meters and designed by architects Róisín Heneghan and Shih-Fu Peng, the GEM houses around 100,000 objects, including the more than 5,000 pieces from Tutankhamun’s treasure, many of them never before exhibited to the public. Its monumental architecture directly dialogues with the Pyramids of Giza, reinforcing a narrative that connects past and future, tradition and modernity.

Objects as Signs: The Semaphoric Dimension

According to object theory and visual semiotics, every museological artifact can operate simultaneously as icon, index, and symbol:

• Icon: by visual resemblance (the mask of Tutankhamun as the likeness of a divine human face).

• Index: by material connection with history (the Solar Boat of Khufu as a concrete trace of funerary rites).

• Symbol: by cultural meaning (Tutankhamun as a universal emblem of Egypt).

  
  

Thus, the objects displayed in the GEM are not mere relics: they are signals reaffirming Egyptian identity, representing a civilization that is both ancient and modern.

From Hieroglyph to Hologram

Hieroglyphs condensed images, sounds, and concepts into a complex graphic system. The GEM updates this ancient logic by employing immersive technologies:

• augmented reality, recreating temples and rituals;

• holographic projections, restoring the splendor of statues and papyri;

• 3D digital reconstructions, allowing visitors to explore Tutankhamun’s tomb without damaging the original site.

  
  

In this sense, the museum becomes a new expanded hieroglyph, where technology amplifies materiality and offers visitors multiple levels of interpretation.

The Museum Between Temple and Forum

Contemporary museology recognizes the museum as a hybrid space: both temple (a place of reverence) and forum (a place of debate).

The GEM embodies this duality:

• As a temple, it monumentalizes Pharaonic heritage, almost echoing the sacred aura of the pyramids.

• As a forum, it opens itself to global tourism, intercultural education, and cultural diplomacy.

  
  

Moreover, the GEM addresses a historical imbalance: while many Egyptian treasures remain in the Louvre or the British Museum, this institution represents an act of heritage reappropriation, returning Egypt to the center of its own narrative.

Visual Rhetoric: The Discourse of the GEM

If rhetoric is the art of persuasion, the GEM uses images and artifacts as visual arguments.

• The colossal statue of Ramses II at the entrance functions as a visual exordium: a grand beginning that predisposes the visitor to believe in the narrative that Egypt is an eternal civilization.

• The exhibition path, which moves from prehistory to the Greco-Roman period, can be read as a classical dispositio:

  
  

  • Exordium – monumental reception in the atrium;

  • Narration – the chronological unfolding of Egyptian civilization;

  • Proofs – Tutankhamun’s treasures and other archaeological findings, functioning as material demonstrations (pisteis);

  • Peroration – the projection of modern Egypt as the legitimate heir of this tradition.

    
    

The GEM’s visual rhetoric thus operates through Aristotle’s three pillars:

• Ethos – credibility, affirmed by monumentality and curatorial order.

• Pathos – emotion, awakened by funerary masks, sarcophagi, and immersive technologies.

• Logos – rationality, expressed in the chronological sequence that guides the visitor through a coherent visual reasoning.

  
  

The museum is, in this sense, a silent orator, whose discourse is made of forms, colors, lights, and shadows.

The Museum as a Cultural Diagram

Visual semiotics teaches that diagrams are special icons, capable of revealing invisible relations. The GEM’s narrative path is a cultural diagram: a visual map that replaces the linearity of verbal language with the simultaneity of images.

The visitor does not merely read labels: they experience a visual argument, where each gallery is a paragraph and each artifact, a sentence.

Final Considerations

The Grand Egyptian Museum is more than an exhibition space: it is a semiotic, rhetorical, and patrimonial monument. It organizes signs, images, and narratives in order to persuade, to move, and to educate. At the same time, it repositions Egypt as the protagonist of its own history, no longer dependent on foreign museums.

The GEM does not merely display the past: it makes us believe in it. Its strength lies in being at once an icon of Pharaonic tradition, an index of historical continuity, and a symbol of a modern Egypt projecting itself into the future.

References

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• SILVEIRA, Andréa Reis da. Introdução à Museologia. Indaial: UNIASSELVI, 2021.

• ROSA, Alahna S. da; JAEGER, Julia M.; PIRES, Kimberly T. A. História dos Museus e das Coleções. Indaial: UNIASSELVI, 2021.

• BARTHES, Roland. Rhetoric of the Image. In: Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

• FLOCH, Jean-Marie. Identités visuelles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.

• SUANO, Marlene. O que é museu?. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986.