The new Grand Egyptian Museum near the Giza pyramids has received the most recent monument for display there: a gate dating nearly 4,000 years old. Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani said in a recent statement that the huge gate was moved with the utmost care from its site at Ezbet Helmy northeast Cairo where an Austrian mission had excavated it. The gate, he said, weighs some 6 tons, is made of pink granite and bears engravings of royal cartouches referring to Amenemhat I, the first king of the 12th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, who ruled from 1991 to 1962BC.
The gate will undergo restoration and be put on display in the great patio of the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is scheduled for partial opening in 2018.
The new museum holds thousands of ancient Egyptian artefacts, a number of them grand monuments such as the statue of the Pharoah Ramses II, and also the belongings of the boy king Tutankhamun.