The single most useful thing one can do before a museum visit, more useful than any guidebook, is to read a single substantial chapter from a single substantial book. Not a wikipedia page, not a tour script, not a "ten things to know" article. A real chapter — twenty to forty pages — that does some thinking. The chapter does two things. First, it gives you the names. Names are the keys to museum labels; without the names, the labels are unreadable. Second, it gives you a question. With a question, a museum visit becomes a search; without a question, a museum visit is a slow walk past glass.
What follows is a small list of books that have been the right reading for me at different stages. Most of them are general — written for an interested non-specialist, not for a student. I have grouped them by what they help with.
For the pharaonic museums (GEM, Tahrir)
1. Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt
If you have time for one book, this is the book. A complete narrative history of pharaonic Egypt from the Predynastic to the Roman conquest, written by an Egyptologist who can write. The chapter on the Old Kingdom — twenty pages — will reward you everywhere in the GEM and Tahrir. Available in English, in cheap paperback, and translated into many languages including Arabic.
2. Kara Cooney, The Woman Who Would Be King (or When Women Ruled the World)
A focused biography of Hatshepsut for the first; a wider survey of pharaonic queens for the second. Either one re-frames the Eighteenth Dynasty galleries at Tahrir and the GEM, where Hatshepsut, Tiye, Nefertiti and others are not just decorative figures but politically substantial actors. After reading either book, the unnamed limestone fragments in the Hatshepsut rooms become, finally, readable.
3. Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun
Now several decades old, but the standard accessible reference. Reeves was the most thoughtful Tutankhamun scholar of his generation. Read the introduction and the chapter on the discovery before visiting the Tutankhamun complex at the GEM. The book is a wonder.
4. Salima Ikram, Ancient Egypt: An Introduction
An Egyptian Egyptologist writing for a general reader. Less narrative than Wilkinson, more thematic. The chapters on religion, on burial practice, and on daily life are particularly useful before a visit to the NMEC. Available in English; an Arabic edition is in preparation.
For the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization
5. Christian Robin (ed.), L'Égypte des civilisations
A French collection of essays on the pre-Islamic and Islamic phases of Egyptian civilisation, with strong essays on the Coptic transition and the Fatimid period. The book is the closest thing in print to a written companion for the NMEC's argument that Egyptian civilisation is one continuous thing. Available in French; Arabic translations of three of the essays are in print.
6. Bob Brier, The Murder of Tutankhamen — and, more importantly, his lectures on mummification
The book itself is speculative and not the strongest of Brier's work. But Brier's published lectures on the techniques of mummification, as a practical conservation history, are the right preparation for the Royal Mummies Hall. They explain what was done to the bodies, and why, and what their condition tells us. After reading him, the mummies become legible.
7. Mostafa El-Abbadi, Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria
A short, beautifully written book by the late Egyptian classicist who founded the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Useful before a visit to the NMEC's general galleries (which include a section on writing and on the library) and indispensable before a visit to the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria. Available in English and Arabic.
For the Museum of Islamic Art at Bab al-Khalq
8. Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Cairo of the Mamluks
The single best book on Mamluk Cairo as a built environment. The Mamluk metalwork, glass and woodwork in the Bab al-Khalq museum come from the same patrons as the buildings in this book. Read the introduction, then the chapter on Sultan Hassan, then the chapter on Qaitbay, and the museum's Mamluk rooms become a set of objects with addresses.
9. Bernard O'Kane, The Illustrated Guide to the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo
The official catalogue of the post-2017 rehang. Illustrated, accurate, in three languages (Arabic, English, French), produced by the museum itself. If you can find a copy, take it with you on the visit.
10. Nasser Rabbat, Mamluk History through Architecture
More academic than the Behrens-Abouseif but full of brilliant chapters on Mamluk patronage, on the meaning of the Mamluk minaret, and on the relationship between Mamluk architecture and Mamluk objects. The chapter on the materiality of the Mamluk court (chapter 4 in my edition) is the right preparation for the museum's metalwork rooms.
For the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria
11. Judith McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt
Sadly out of print but findable second-hand or in libraries. The most thorough survey of Alexandrian architectural history from the Hellenistic to the Roman to the early Christian. Read the chapter on the necropoleis before a visit to the Greco-Roman Museum's necropoleis rooms.
12. C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems
Not a history book. A collection of poems by Alexandria's most important modern poet, who lived in the city from 1885 to 1933 and wrote, repeatedly, about the Hellenistic and Roman past as a continuous presence. Read "Ithaka", "The God Abandons Antony", "In a Town of Osroene", and "Caesarion" before a visit to the Greco-Roman Museum, and the rooms about the Ptolemaic queens become poems instead of cases. Cavafy lived two streets from the museum. Available in English (Keeley/Sherrard translation), in the original Greek, and in a fine modern Arabic translation.
The poet Cavafy and the curators of the Greco-Roman Museum were, in effect, doing the same job from opposite sides of the same street.
What I do not recommend
I do not recommend, before a museum visit, reading a guidebook of "the top fifty objects" or "the things you must see". The list-format guidebook turns the visit into a checklist, and the checklist robs the visit of attention. If a label catches your eye for an unlisted object, you should be free to spend twenty minutes with it; the checklist makes you feel guilty for doing so. Discard the list. Read a chapter instead.
I also do not recommend the more romantic mid-twentieth-century travel writing about Egypt, even by writers I love. Its account of museums is, unavoidably, the colonial account of museums — the museum as the curiosity cabinet of a foreign visitor. The post-2020 generation of Egyptian curators has been writing a different account, and it is the one the museums are now, slowly, telling. Read with that in mind.
Where to find these books
Most are available, in their English editions, at one of the larger English-language bookshops in Cairo (the bookshop in Zamalek opposite the Marriott, the AUC Press shop near Tahrir, the small bookshop on the upper floor of the Diwan in Heliopolis). The AUC Press editions are usually the cheapest. Arabic translations are best looked for at one of the smaller secondhand bookshops in Sharia el-Maghraby and around Maydan Falaki. Out-of-print titles can sometimes be found in the Sur al-Azbakiya book market.
If you are reading on a flight or before you arrive, all of these books exist in digital editions through the major retailers. For the weight-conscious traveller, a Kindle full of three or four of these is the most useful object you will pack.
Last advice: read the catalogue afterwards
If a museum has a catalogue of its current rehang, buy or borrow it after the visit, not before. Read it in a café in the days that follow, with your notebook from the visit beside you. The catalogue read after the visit will tell you what you missed; the catalogue read before the visit will only tell you what to look for. The first is a longer and richer reading.
Last revised: 24 April 2026. Suggestions of additions are warmly welcomed.