Egypt's massive new museum for its famous antiquities now has a power plant, a fire station and its own conservation center, and over the next two years it will become home to some 100,000 artifacts.

Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said the third stage of the project will be completed in 26 months, noting that GEM would be open for visitors by mid 2012.

The GEM exhibits are classified into five main themes, or "streams", of ancient Egyptian life: "Land of Egypt" (an outdoor garden featuring pharaonic-era agriculture), "Kingship and State", "Religion and Afterlife", "Man, Society and Work", and "Scribes and Learning". The exhibits and artefacts for each will be arranged chronologically along parallel exhibition halls emanating from the main gallery at the top of the grand staircase.

For the forthcoming couple of months the Egyptian Museum is hosting an exhibition of five dozen ancient Egyptian artefacts unearthed at three archaeological sites by the mission from Waseda University over the past 40 years. These unique objects have never before been exhibited. They derive from Abusir, the site of 11 pyramids south of Giza; Dahshour, the site of King Senefru's pyramids; and Malkata on Luxor's west bank, where the grandfather of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, Amenhotep III, dug a lake and built a palace for his beautiful and powerful wife, Queen Tiye.

During working in the project of developing the Egyptian Museum, a monument cache was discovered near the western door's stair in the western part of the Cairo Egyptian Museum. The cache is part of four other parts of a broken inscription that contain limestone hieroglyphic writing. It was divided into two parts with some hieroglyphic signs.

Culture Minister Farouk Hosni has decided to put recently restored stolen antiquities from the United States at the Egyptian Museum in downtown Cairo. Egypt received in 2006 a tip about the sale of the artifacts to a U.S. antiquities dealer in the Maadi district. The dealer, identified as Edward George Johnson, managed to smuggle them out of Cairo Airport but was arrested by US federal authorities following a demand from Egypt.

More than 4,500 years after the Ancient Egyptians built the marvels at Giza, a new museum is taking shape that when finished will be bigger than the Louvre in France. That new structure is the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), which, when complete, will be the biggest museum of Egyptology in the world, and (it’s claimed) the largest archaeo-logical museum of any sort.