Coptic Museum — the global reference for Coptic and early-Christian Egyptian material.

What you are looking at

The Coptic Museum sits in the Mar Girgis district of southern Cairo, immediately adjacent to the Hanging Church (Kanisat al-Mu'allaqa) and inside the small precinct of medieval Christian Cairo enclosed by the Roman walls of Babylon Fortress. The museum was founded in 1908 by Marcus Simaika Pasha to consolidate the Coptic-period collections that had previously been scattered between the Egyptian Museum, the Khedivial Library, and a number of monastic libraries. The current arrangement — two purpose-built buildings on a shared garden — reached its present form in 2006, after a comprehensive renovation programme that closed the museum for four years.

The collection of approximately 16,000 objects is the largest body of Coptic and early-Christian Egyptian material assembled anywhere. Standing-out holdings include: the Nag Hammadi library codices (13 leather-bound 4th-century books containing the most important early-Christian gnostic and apocryphal texts ever recovered); the museum's exceptional textile collection, which is among the largest single corpora of late-antique textile in the world; and the small but important set of Fayyum mummy portraits, the painted late-Roman tomb portraits that connect the Pharaonic and Christian funerary traditions.

The museum also holds the collection of architectural fragments rescued from the monasteries of the Wadi Natrun and Wadi el-Natrun, the painted wood ceiling of the Old Coptic Church of Saint Mercurius dismantled during conservation in the 1970s, and a comprehensive collection of icons from the medieval and early modern Coptic Church. The Fayyum portraits are displayed in gallery 2 in chronological order; the Nag Hammadi codices are in a single specialised cabinet in gallery 17, with rotating page-display to limit light exposure.

On the ground

Address: 3 Sharia Mar Girgis, Coptic Cairo. Standard opening hours are 09:00–17:00 daily. Foreign adult ticket EGP 220 at the last verification; foreign student EGP 110; Egyptian national EGP 30. Photography permit EGP 50 (hand-held cameras only, no flash, no tripod). The garden between the two buildings has a small café functioning year-round.

Transport: from the El-Manial desk, 12 minutes by taxi south along the corniche. From central Tahrir, 15 minutes by taxi. The nearest metro station is Mar Girgis on Line 1, directly outside the Coptic Cairo precinct entrance — a one-minute walk from the metro exit to the museum. The Hanging Church is 100 metres south of the museum entrance; the Saint Sergius and Bacchus Church (Abu Serga, where tradition holds the Holy Family rested during the flight into Egypt) is 200 metres east. Most visitors combine the museum with both churches in a single morning.

Most-visited galleries: gallery 9 for the textile holdings (allow proper time), gallery 17 for the Nag Hammadi codices (the cabinet rotation changes which folio is visible roughly every six months; subscribers receive the current state), and gallery 2 for the Fayyum portraits.

Reading list

• Gabra, G. (ed.). Coptic Civilization: Two Thousand Years of Christianity in Egypt. American University in Cairo Press, 2014. Standard accessible reference.
• Bulletin de la Société d'archéologie copte. Annual academic journal of Coptic studies, 1935–present.
• Burkhardt, H. The Nag Hammadi Library and the Coptic Museum. Suhaymi Archive subscriber monograph, 2025.
• Lebret, I. Textile Gallery 9 — A Visitor's Reading. Suhaymi Archive subscriber annual, 2024.
• Suhaymi Archive field notebooks 2015–2026, "CM" tag.