The first time I went to the Egyptian Museum at Tahrir as an adult, on my own, I wore the wrong shoes. They were not bad shoes — they were perfectly good Italian shoes I had bought as a student in Perugia — but they had hard leather soles, and after three hours on the original 1902 marble I could not feel my feet. I made it to the small café across Sharia el-Tahrir, sat down, and could not stand up again for forty minutes. I have remembered the lesson ever since. There are about ten things, none of them dramatic, that make the difference between a good museum visit and one that ends in a taxi back to the hotel by two in the afternoon.

This is the list I give to friends, in order of importance.

1. Water

One half-litre bottle, refillable. Most state museums in Egypt allow water in a closed bottle into the galleries. The Tahrir museum is strict at the entrance security but allows you to bring a sealed bottle through. The GEM allows water freely. NMEC allows it but asks you to drink only at the benches, not in the galleries. Have it with you. The galleries are dry, especially in winter when the heating runs, and dehydration in Egypt happens faster than visitors expect — even indoors.

A small thing

Tap water in Cairo, filtered, is fine to drink.

Refill at your hotel before you leave, or buy a bottle at one of the small kiosks on the corner. Both are easy.

2. Soft-soled shoes

Sneakers, walking shoes, soft-soled flats. Anything except hard leather, anything except heels. The galleries you will spend the longest time in have either polished concrete (NMEC, GEM), terrazzo (the Greco-Roman in Alexandria) or marble (Tahrir, Bab al-Khalq). All four of these surfaces magnify foot fatigue. After three to four hours, the difference between rubber soles and leather soles is the difference between an enjoyable afternoon and a forced rest.

3. A small notebook and a pencil

Pen ink is forbidden in some galleries (it can leak; staff are wary of anything liquid near cases). Pencil is universally allowed. A small notebook — pocket-sized, perhaps A6 — and a short pencil are unobtrusive and let you write down what you want to look up later: a name on a label, a dynasty, a cartouche, the number of a case. Notes made on the floor are surprisingly different from notes you can recreate from memory three hours later. Take them.

4. A charged phone with two languages

Most labels in Egyptian state museums are now in Arabic and English. Older labels at Tahrir are still partly in French. If you have an offline translation tool installed on your phone, it will pay for itself in the first hour. The two languages worth having for any museum visit in Egypt are Arabic and either French or English; if you have all three, you are over-equipped, but you will use them.

Power the phone from full before you leave the hotel. Galleries do not have public charging points, by design — power outlets are reserved for cleaning and conservation use.

5. A small, soft bag

A satchel, a small backpack, or a tote — soft-sided, no rigid frame. Hard cases, hard backpacks with frames, photography bags with metal fittings will be asked to be left at the cloakroom. Most museums have a free cloakroom near the entrance, but the queue at peak hours can take twenty minutes, and you will lose your morning window.

The bag I bring is a small canvas satchel, perhaps thirty centimetres on its longest side. It holds the water, the notebook, the phone, a small wallet, a folded paper map (yes, paper), a snack, and one small extra layer for the air-conditioning.

6. A light layer for inside

The new museums (GEM, NMEC) are aggressively air-conditioned. In summer, walking in from outside, the temperature drop is around fifteen degrees. After ninety minutes inside, especially if you are sitting still in a quiet gallery, you will be cool. A linen shirt or a light cardigan, packed flat, is enough. In winter, the air-conditioning is calmer but the older buildings (Tahrir) are draughty. The same layer works.

7. A printed list of names

This is a habit I keep from my time as a gallery worker. Before a visit, I write down on a single sheet of paper the names — pharaohs, queens, periods, gods, materials — that I want to be able to recognise on labels. Three to ten names, no more. The list goes in the notebook. When I see one of those names on a label, I read the label slowly and add a note. Without the list, the labels become a wash. With the list, the labels become a conversation.

8. A small snack

Eating in the galleries is forbidden, in all museums in Egypt, including in the cafés that adjoin the galleries — the cafés have their own zones. But a small wrapped snack in your bag — a date, a small piece of bread, a biscuit — is welcome at the bench in the museum garden or on the way out. Low blood sugar is the single most common cause of museum fatigue. Eat something every two hours, not because you are hungry but because the gallery is asking it of you.

9. A paper map of the building

Most museums offer a printed plan at the entrance. Take one. The phone-based maps of the larger museums are not yet reliable, and the paper plans are usually well drawn. I mark on the plan, with my pencil, the rooms I have been in and the rooms I have not. On a long visit, this is the difference between a directed afternoon and a wandering one.

10. Patience

The least packable item, and the most important. Egyptian museums are large. They are organised on conventions that are not always intuitive. They have, in many cases, restoration works in progress, signage being updated, galleries that close for a week without much notice. Plan for things to take longer than you expected. Plan to sit. Plan to come back to a room you missed. The museums reward patience and punish hurry, and they have been doing so for a very long time.

The bag you take into a museum should weigh less than the notes you take out.

The bag I do not take

What I have stopped bringing, after a decade of visits:

  • A guidebook in print. Too heavy, usually out of date by the time of the visit. The notebook fills the same role.
  • A camera with interchangeable lenses. The phone is more than enough for the kinds of pictures most visitors actually want, and the camera invites curatorial concern at the entrance.
  • Headphones. The galleries are conversational; the staff sometimes need to address you; the headphones get in the way. If you bring an audio guide, the museum's own headphones are the right ones.
  • A laptop. Never, in any museum, anywhere in Egypt. There is no reason for it. Leave it at the hotel.
  • Anything I would be unhappy to lose at the cloakroom. Cloakroom losses are very rare in Egypt, but the principle is sound: travel light into the gallery.

One more thing — for women specifically

I am sometimes asked what to wear. The honest answer: anything modest by your own standards is fine in a state museum in Egypt. There is no formal dress code. I usually wear long trousers or a long skirt and a sleeved shirt, and I cover my shoulders if I am going on to a religious site afterwards. Sandals are fine in summer; they are not the comfort risk that hard heels are. The only rule I follow without exception is that I do not wear anything I cannot sit on the floor in for ten minutes if I want to. Sitting on the floor — politely, in a corner — is sometimes the best way to look at a low case.

Last revised: 26 April 2026. Suggestions and additions welcome at [email protected].