The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir

The Egyptian Museum has stood on Tahrir Square since 1902. It is a pink neoclassical building holding an enormous collection in conditions no modern museum would design — cases from the 1920s, handwritten labels, and objects stacked in a way that feels closer to a warehouse than a gallery.

The most common question about it now is whether it is still worth visiting since Tutankhamun moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza. The answer is yes, for reasons that have little to do with Tutankhamun.

The Royal Mummies. The mummies of Egypt's New Kingdom pharaohs — the actual bodies of Ramesses II, Seti I, Thutmose III, Hatshepsut — were long the most extraordinary thing here, and the collection has been reorganised in recent years and partly relocated to a purpose-built hall at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Fustat. Check where it currently sits before you plan around it, because it is worth planning around.

The Amarna room. Akhenaten's reign produced Egyptian art unlike any other period — elongated faces, informal family scenes, a naturalism that appears once and never returns. The colossal statues of Akhenaten here are among the strangest objects in Egyptian art.

The Old Kingdom sculpture. Rahotep and Nofret, the seated scribe, the Sheikh el-Beled, Khafre with the falcon behind his head — these are the foundational works of Egyptian art and they are here, at eye level, usually with nobody standing in front of them.

And the building itself is now a historical object. It is the last surviving example of how a great archaeological collection was displayed a century ago, and once Egypt finishes moving material out to newer museums, that atmosphere will be gone.

The collection was founded by Auguste Mariette in the middle of the nineteenth century, partly to stop the wholesale export of Egyptian antiquities, and moved into the current building on Tahrir Square in 1902.

It rapidly outgrew it. For most of the twentieth century, far more of the collection sat in storage than on display, and the basement became famous among Egyptologists as a place where objects could effectively be lost.

The building was damaged and partly looted during the unrest of 2011, standing directly on Tahrir Square. Most of the stolen objects were recovered.

The opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation at Fustat has redistributed the collection across three sites. The Tahrir museum has not closed and retains a very large holding.

• The Old Kingdom sculpture galleries — Rahotep and Nofret, the Seated Scribe, Khafre with the falcon
• The Amarna gallery and the colossal statues of Akhenaten
• The Middle Kingdom models — miniature workshops, boats and granaries from tomb burials
• The Fayum mummy portraits, painted in a Greco-Roman style over Egyptian burials
• The Tanis treasure, including the silver coffin of Psusennes I
• The building itself, and the garden with Mariette's tomb