Inside the Museo Egizio: The Must-See Highlights of Turin's Egyptian Collection

The Museo Egizio holds over 37,000 catalogued objects across three floors of a 17th-century Baroque palace. For first-time visitors, the scale can be disorienting. This guide cuts straight to the artefacts that define the collection — the ones that justify the Museo Egizio’s position as the world’s second-largest Egyptian museum outside Cairo, and that no visit should leave without.

The Tomb of Kha and Merit

If you see nothing else in Turin, see this. The tomb of Kha and Merit is the Museo Egizio’s defining possession — the object that separates it from every other Egyptian museum in the world.

Kha was a royal architect who oversaw construction projects in the Valley of the Kings during the reigns of three pharaohs: Amenhotep II, Tuthmosis IV, and Amenhotep III. In around 1400 BC, he and his wife Merit were buried at Deir el-Medina, the village near the Valley of the Kings that housed the artisans and craftsmen who built the royal tombs.

In 1906, the Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli led an expedition that located the tomb. What they found was extraordinary: the tomb had never been looted. Everything inside remained exactly as it had been placed by the mourners who sealed the door 3,400 years earlier. Kha’s funeral furniture — wooden chairs and beds — his tools, his clothing, his linen, his cosmetics, his food offerings, and the personal objects of both Kha and Merit were all present and in near-perfect condition. His wife’s wig, packed carefully in a cylindrical box, was intact. Kha’s reed basket of bread remained sealed. His bronze razor and comb were beside his bed.

The entire contents of the tomb are displayed together in Turin, recreating the spatial logic of the original burial chamber. No other museum in the world holds a comparably intact assemblage from a non-royal Ancient Egyptian tomb.

The Statue of Ramesses II

The granite colossus of Ramesses II is the image most people associate with the Museo Egizio — a seven-tonne seated figure carved in black granite during the 19th Dynasty, around 1279 BC. Ramesses II ruled Egypt for 66 years (circa 1279–1213 BC) and commissioned more statuary than any other pharaoh in history. This example was discovered at Thebes and brought to Turin in the 19th century during the collection-building expeditions that gave the museum its initial depth.

The statue is not merely impressive in scale. The quality of the carving — the rendering of the headdress, the precision of the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the throne — marks it as a product of one of the great ateliers of the New Kingdom. Stand in front of it and look at the face: the expression is composed, slightly severe, entirely in command. It was designed to project exactly that. After more than three millennia, it still does.

The Royal Canon of Turin Papyrus

The Royal Canon is the Museo Egizio’s most academically significant object, and one of the most important historical documents in existence.

Written on papyrus during the reign of Ramesses II (circa 1250 BC), it is the most complete king-list ever produced in ancient Egypt — naming approximately 300 pharaohs across 19 dynasties, with the length of each reign recorded in years, months, and days. Before the Royal Canon was studied, Egyptologists had no reliable framework for Egyptian chronology. The papyrus remains the primary source from which all timelines of ancient Egyptian history are constructed.

It arrived in Turin in fragmented condition in the early 19th century, and reassembling its pieces was one of the great scholarly puzzles of 19th-century Egyptology. Even today, some fragments remain unplaced. The papyrus is displayed under carefully controlled lighting, and guides explain both its content and the extraordinary forensic work of reconstruction.

The Temple of Ellesiya

The Temple of Ellesiya is the most viscerally extraordinary thing in the museum. It is not a representation or a replica. It is an actual Nubian rock temple, built during the reign of Tuthmosis III around 1450 BC, that was cut from its original cliff face, shipped to Italy, and reassembled inside the Museo Egizio.

The temple was originally located on the west bank of the Nile in Nubia, in the region that was flooded by the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. Egypt launched an international appeal to preserve the Nubian monuments threatened by the rising waters — the same campaign that saved Abu Simbel. In recognition of Italian funding and expertise contributed to the rescue effort, Egypt gifted the Temple of Ellesiya to Italy in 1970. It was dismantled into 66 sections, transported to Turin, and rebuilt inside the museum.

You walk into it. The interior is decorated with relief carvings showing Tuthmosis III making offerings to the gods Horus and Satis. The colours have faded, but the carving is sharp. The space is small — a single chamber with a cult niche at the rear — and the compression of 3,400 years into a room you can stand inside is one of the genuinely strange experiences the Museo Egizio offers.

The Papyrus Collection

The Museo Egizio holds one of the world’s largest collections of ancient papyri — including not just the Royal Canon but funerary texts, administrative records, letters, and literary works. The funerary papyri include beautifully illustrated copies of spells from the Book of the Dead. The administrative records give an unusually detailed picture of the daily operations of the Valley of the Kings worksite, including payroll records, absence logs, and disciplinary notes from the Deir el-Medina community.

Everyday Life Objects

One of the museum’s quieter pleasures is the collection of domestic objects — the things that ordinary Ancient Egyptians used, wore, ate with, and slept under. Wooden combs, linen garments, leather sandals, cosmetic palettes, board games, food storage vessels. Many of these come from the tomb of Kha and bring the life of a prosperous 18th Dynasty household into startling focus.

Children respond particularly well to these galleries. Ancient Egyptian people used wooden spoons and linen pillows. They played board games and kept cosmetics in decorated boxes. The foreignness dissolves into recognition.

The Mummy Galleries

The museum’s mummies span pre-dynastic burials (from around 3500 BC) through the Late Period. The pre-dynastic mummies are natural — preserved by the dry desert sand rather than by artificial techniques — and among the oldest mummified human remains on public display anywhere.

The New Kingdom mummies in the upper galleries include both royal-adjacent figures and individuals whose wrapped, painted, and inscribed coffins tell detailed stories of identity, social status, and religious belief. The museum presents mummies within their funerary and religious context: as people whose families prepared them carefully for an afterlife, rather than as curiosities. Guided tours in particular handle this section with care and depth.

For details on planning your visit — including the best time of day to have the galleries in relative quiet — see our timing and opening hours guide.

The artefacts described above are all accessible with any guided tour or standard admission ticket. See the full range of options and check live availability at /#availability. Every booking includes free cancellation.