BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts.

Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service.

Coming to you live from London, I'm James Kamara Sami.

We begin today in Egypt and in the shadow of the Pyramids of Giza,

a fanfare for ancient pharaohs.

Those trumpets heralded the start of an opening ceremony

for a museum that has been many years in the construction

and contains artef artifacts spanning a far greater

time scale, seven millennia.

There was plenty of traditional Egyptian music as dozens of delegations which included

some world leaders, attended this

official opening of the billion-dollar Grand Egyptian Museum. A global gathering, but also a moment

for Egypt's President Abdul Fata Alsisi to send a message of national pride.

I welcome you all to the land of Egypt, the oldest nation ever known.

Here, civilization wrote its first letters, and here the world saw the birth of art, thought, writing, and doctrine.

This great museum is not just a place to keep precious antiquities,

but a living witness to the genius of the Egyptians.

There are tens of thousands of artefacts inside the building, but the star attraction is the Boy King Tutankhamun's Tomb, whose contents are displayed

in their entirety for the first time since they were discovered by a British archaeologist just

over a century ago. Although many of the relics have been shown in their native land before, this was

the opening of an exhibition in Cairo's Tahrir Square in 1949.

In Cairo, that great storehouse of ancient treasures, the museum, exhibits the relics of King Tutankhamun.

...