What the Pass is for.
An editorial note from Marwa al-Tabari on the structure and the principles of the project.
Egypt is in a moment of curatorial reorganisation. The Grand Egyptian Museum opened in late 2025; the Royal Mummies moved to NMEC in 2021; the avenue of sphinxes between Karnak and Luxor was reopened in the same year. The country's heritage infrastructure is, for the first time since the 1902 Tahrir building was completed, in active reshape.
This broadsheet exists to track that reshape, slowly and at field level. The remit is narrow on purpose. We do not list hotels. We do not compare restaurants. We do not sell tickets, passes or tours. We write down what we see on the ground, every season, and we publish it once it has been twice checked.
What we publish
Five field readings per edition, each centred on a specific site or museum. Six standing sections — About, Visit Us, Quick Pass, Opening Hours, Online Support, Contact — which carry the practical orientation that does not change between issues. Readings replace each other quarterly; sections are revised continuously.
The point of the broadsheet is not to replace your visit. It is to delay your visit by exactly the time required to read three paragraphs in advance.
Each reading follows the same architecture. A short historical placement. The present-day reality of the site, including what has changed since the last published reading. The practical logistics, in numbers and in routes. Where possible, a small honest observation about the visit itself — what works, what does not.
How we work
The editor visits each site personally before publication. Where a reading is republished from an older edition, the date of the last on-site visit is given. No reading is published from secondary sources alone, however authoritative. Conservation officers and site inspectors are credited where they provided substantive information.
Corrections from readers are received with care. A correction that holds against on-site verification reshapes the next edition; the contributor is credited at the foot of the affected entry. Letters of disagreement, when reasoned, are published in the Contact section in summary.
What this broadsheet is not
The Egypt Pass is not a ticket agent and never has been. The name is editorial; "pass" refers to the visitor's own movement through the country, not to any product. The site does not sell admission, transport, accommodation or tours. The site does not partner with any third-party booking platform. References to ticketing on the Visit Us and Opening Hours pages are informational; readers should make all arrangements through official site offices or their own preferred channels.
The honest job of a broadsheet is to make the visitor read three paragraphs before they spend three days.
The Egypt Pass is not a travel blog and does not chase a public. The archive is published at a slow rhythm of one major edition per quarter and a small number of intermediate revisions. The audience the editor imagines is a traveller, a student, or a colleague abroad — three different readers held in the same sentence.
The team
The broadsheet is written and edited by Marwa al-Tabari, based in Cairo. The site is designed and maintained by a small studio, by hand, without templated content. The two posts per year that require deeper archaeological detail are reviewed by a small panel of friends in the discipline before publication. All editorial decisions, including the choice of what to include and what to omit, rest with the editor.
— Marwa al-Tabari, Cairo