What we are
Museum Heritage Review is an independent publication founded in 2022 and based in Downtown Cairo, at an editorial address on Champollion Street — a location chosen, not accidentally, for its proximity to the Egyptian Museum at Tahrir. The project exists to publish long-form, researched, and carefully fact-checked editorial coverage of the museums of Egypt for an English-reading audience outside the country.
We are not a travel agency. We do not sell tickets, organise tours, book hotels, or take commissions on museum admission. We are not a guidebook publisher, and we do not produce printed editions. We do not accept sponsored content, affiliate links, or paid placement of any kind. The site you are reading is exactly what it appears to be: an editorial publication, written by a small team of Egyptian journalists and scholars, published online and free to read.
What we cover
Our core coverage is the network of museums and heritage institutions across the country — pharaonic, Coptic, Islamic, Nubian, and modern. Our archive of long-form guides currently includes six major institutions, and we publish new articles at a rate of roughly one per month. In addition to the principal institutions covered in our published guides, we regularly write about smaller regional museums — the Alexandria National Museum, the Museum of Islamic Art in Bab al-Khalq, the Mallawi Museum in Minya, the Imhotep Museum at Saqqara, and others — as well as the heritage sites and open-air museums that function, in effect, as extensions of the museum network.
We also cover ongoing changes in the Egyptian museum landscape: new openings, major acquisitions, conservation projects, and the occasional policy development affecting access or curation. We do not cover breaking news as it happens — we are a small editorial team, and our commitment is to depth rather than speed — but we publish considered analysis of significant institutional events as they settle into perspective.
Our editorial standards
Every article we publish is original. We do not aggregate from other publications, we do not rewrite press releases, and we do not commission from freelancers working from Wikipedia entries. Each piece begins with an editor physically visiting the institution in question, sometimes several times. We photograph what we are writing about (where photography is permitted), and we take detailed notes on the current state of the installation, the labels, and the visitor experience.
Factual claims — dates, dimensions, inventory numbers, attributions — are verified against the museum's own published catalogue where one exists, against the publications of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and against the peer-reviewed Egyptological literature. Where the scholarly position on a question has shifted or remains contested, we say so in the article. Where we are uncertain, we flag the uncertainty rather than paper over it.
We do not use any generative AI system to write our articles. Every sentence on this site has been written, revised, and edited by a human editor. We believe this is a meaningful commitment in a moment when much online writing about heritage subjects is being produced by systems that have no ability to verify what they are claiming.
Our full editorial policy — including our corrections process, our approach to conflicts of interest, and our image licensing practice — is published on a separate page and linked from the footer of every article.
The team
Museum Heritage Review is produced by a small editorial team. Our three regular contributors, between them, hold degrees in Egyptology, archaeology, and heritage journalism, and have worked in and around the Egyptian museum sector for a combined period of more than three decades.
Mariam Fahmy
Mariam holds an MA in Egyptology from the American University in Cairo and has written about museum culture for regional publications since 2014. She leads our Cairo coverage.
Karim El-Sayed
Karim is a former field archaeologist who worked on excavations in Saqqara and Luxor before turning to journalism. He covers museum openings, restoration projects, and institutional policy.
Dina Saleh
Based in Aswan, Dina writes about Nubian heritage, Coptic history, and museums outside the Cairo-Giza corridor. Her work has appeared in regional heritage journals.
How the project is funded
Museum Heritage Review is self-funded by its editorial team. We have received no external grants, no corporate sponsorship, and no institutional support from any museum, tourism board, or government agency. Our running costs are modest — a domain, hosting, occasional travel within Egypt — and they are covered out of pocket. We mention this only because readers occasionally ask, and because the structure of our funding is relevant to the independence of our coverage.
We do not run advertising on the site, and we have no plans to do so. We do maintain a monthly email digest, which is free to subscribe to and which we send no more than once a month. The digest consists of a note from the editors and links to new articles. There are no advertisements in the digest, and we do not share our subscriber list with any third party.
Our relationship with the institutions we cover
We write about the Egyptian museum sector. The institutions in that sector are, in most cases, public and operated by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities through the Supreme Council of Antiquities. We have no formal relationship with the ministry, the council, or any individual museum administration. Our editors visit museums as members of the public, pay the standard admission where required, and do not request or accept press passes, media tours, or privileged access.
Where we interview curators, conservators, or other museum staff — which we do occasionally, for context on specific conservation projects or new acquisitions — we identify them by name and position, and we send the relevant passage of our draft for fact-checking before publication. We do not grant pre-publication approval over the interpretation or framing of an article.
Errors and corrections
We try hard to be accurate, but errors happen. If you spot a factual error in anything we have published — a misstated date, a misidentified object, an attribution that has been superseded in the scholarly literature — please write to our editors at [email protected]. We aim to acknowledge correction emails within two working days and to publish corrections in the body of the relevant article, with a note at the bottom indicating what has been changed and when.
Why English-language coverage
Egyptian museum culture is of global significance, and most writing about it in international media is produced outside Egypt by writers who do not live here. Our editors do. We think there is a real — and under-served — need for English-language coverage of the country's museums that is produced by people on the ground, in close contact with the institutions, and with the patience to write at the length the subject requires. That is what Museum Heritage Review tries to be. If we succeed, it is in part because our readers give us the time to do the work properly.
We hope you find something here of use. For questions, corrections, or simply to say hello, our editors are reachable at [email protected].