142 condensed field cards across 34 Egyptian heritage sites and excursions, indexed by region, traffic level and the last rotation date. This page is the master listing — every card published by the Mohandessin desk between November 2021 and the current spring 2026 rotation cycle. Each entry on the list is summarised in two or three lines and links through to its dedicated thematic section. Use the regional breakdown below to find the section that matches your trip, or scroll the full table at the bottom of the page for the unfiltered archive.
The archive is biased, by editorial choice, toward the corridor between Cairo and Aswan — the route most readers travel. Sinai and the Red Sea coast are covered, but at city-card depth rather than card-per-site depth. Alexandria sits in its own block, large enough to be its own subsection. The Western Desert oases are covered in a short prep-style entry only, because the changeable security situation makes individual-site cards out of date too quickly to be useful.
The largest section of the archive. Major museums, the Giza plateau, the Saqqara and Dahshur necropoles, Coptic Cairo, Islamic Cairo, the Khan, and the Nile-side cultural strip between Garden City and Maadi. Re-rotated every quarter.
The Egyptian Museum (Tahrir), the Grand Egyptian Museum (Giza), the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (Fustat), the Coptic Museum, the Museum of Islamic Art and twelve smaller permanent collections. Each card includes the current ticket tier, the camera-fee structure and the side door that bypasses the main queue.
The Giza pyramids (with separate cards for each pyramid and for the Solar Boat Museum), the Sphinx, the Step Pyramid of Djoser, the Imhotep Museum, the Dahshur Bent and Red pyramids, Memphis and the open-air alabaster sphinx. Stand-alone half-day plan card included.
The Hanging Church, the Church of St. Sergius, the Ben Ezra Synagogue, the Coptic Cemetery walk, the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, Al-Azhar, the Bab Zuwayla minaret climb, the Mosque of Sultan Hassan and the Citadel of Saladin. Each card flags dress code and shoe-removal rules.
The Khan after dark, El-Fishawi café, Al-Muizz Street, the brass-and-copper alley, the Tentmakers' Bazaar, the Souq al-Fustat ceramics complex, and the Wikalat al-Ghouri craft showcase. Cards include realistic haggle ranges in Egyptian pounds.
Nesma Hosny's main beat. Theban temples, the Valley of the Kings and Queens, Hatshepsut, Medinet Habu, the Ramesseum, the Colossi of Memnon and the lesser tomb fields. Includes the Luxor museum cards and the half-day east-bank loop.
Karnak (six cards: Hypostyle, sacred lake, festival hall, open-air museum, Khonsu temple, and the under-restoration Akhenaten talatat block area), Luxor Temple morning, Luxor Temple evening, Avenue of Sphinxes connecting walk, and the small but charming Luxor Mummification Museum.
The general ticket and what it actually includes, the Seti I supplement (worth it), the Tutankhamun supplement (skippable), Nefertari's tomb (extraordinary, supplement justified, photography rules updated April 2026), Ramses VI, plus a full card on the tomb-rotation cycle that the SCA runs to manage humidity.
Deir el-Bahari complete card, Medinet Habu with the most legible relief panels on the west bank, the Ramesseum, the Colossi of Memnon, Deir el-Medina, the Tombs of the Nobles cluster card, and Howard Carter's house.
The Corniche felucca rates (current spring 2026), the west-bank taxi rates, the public ferry, the river-crossing rates after dark, and the four hotel zones (Corniche, west-bank, airport-side, Karnak-side) with their realistic price bands. Also: the train back to Cairo.
The far-southern beat. Aswan as a city card, the temples reached by boat (Philae, Kalabsha), the High Dam and the Aswan museum, Abu Simbel by convoy and by flight, and the Lake Nasser cruise stops. Includes a card on the Nubian Museum south of the river — one of the strongest single-museum cards in the archive.
Philae (with separate cards for the morning visit and the after-dark sound-and-light, of which only the morning is recommended), Kalabsha by boat, Elephantine Island walk, Kitchener's Island, the Nubian Museum, the unfinished obelisk, and the Aswan High Dam observation deck card.
The two temples (Ramses II and Nefertari) at Abu Simbel, the 04:00 convoy from Aswan, the EgyptAir morning flight, the equinox solar alignment ticket (October 22 and February 22, sells out three months ahead), and the Lake Nasser cruise stops including Wadi al-Sebua and Amada.
The three river-side temples that every Nile cruise stops at, plus a stand-alone card on the difference between a four-day and a seven-day cruise itinerary. Edfu (most intact relief programme), Esna (the smallest, the most damaged), Kom Ombo (the double temple, best at sunset).
Bassel Rashwan's beat. The Greco-Roman Museum re-opening, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa, Pompey's Pillar, the Roman amphitheatre, Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai, the Sharm el-Sheikh card and the Hurghada card. The coast section deliberately stops at city level.
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (including the antiquities, manuscript and Sadat museum cards inside the complex), the Greco-Roman Museum, the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa, Pompey's Pillar, the Roman amphitheatre, Fort Qaitbey, the Royal Jewellery Museum and the Alexandria National Museum.
Saint Catherine's Monastery (visit hours, dress code, the icon collection, the Burning Bush courtyard, the Mount Sinai overnight climb), Dahab as a base city, Sharm el-Sheikh as a base city, the Ras Mohammed National Park card, and the practical security and military checkpoint card.
City-level cards for the five main Red Sea resort towns. We do not cover individual hotels (that is not our format) but we do flag the kind of holiday each city actually delivers, where the airport is, what the inland-day excursion options look like, and which town is best avoided in August.
The internal rotation schedule. Major-traffic sites are re-walked quarterly; mid-traffic sites twice a year; low-traffic sites annually. The first column is the section page; the second is the count of cards in that section; the third is the most recent rotation date as of publication of this archive listing.
| Section | Cards | Last rotation | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top Collections | 27 | April 2026 | Quarterly |
| Pharaoh Sites | 34 | March 2026 | Quarterly |
| Day Itineraries | 18 | April 2026 | Quarterly |
| City Cards | 19 | February 2026 | Twice a year |
| Prep Notes | 22 | April 2026 | Twice a year |
| Season Guide | 12 | March 2026 | Twice a year |
| Family-Friendly | 10 | February 2026 | Twice a year |
Cards re-rotated less than ninety days ago are considered current. Cards between ninety days and the next rotation cycle are considered fresh. Cards inside the rotation cycle (between, say, the spring rotation and the autumn one) are watched for reader corrections and updated mid-cycle when a correction is filed.
If you want a card on a site that is not currently in the archive — for example, a regional museum in Sohag, Minya or Asyut — write to the desk. The four-editor team cannot promise to write a card on every request, but every request is read and queued. About half of the queue is published within a calendar year of the original reader request.
Many readers ask what goes into producing one of the cards in this archive. The honest answer is that the format is built around discipline rather than volume — each card represents two visits to the site, one fact-checking pass, one editorial review and the photograph that is taken on the second visit. The full workflow below is what the desk runs through for every entry in the archive, from the smallest west-bank tomb supplement to the GEM flagship card.
The first visit is reconnaissance. The responsible editor (Sherif Maged for Cairo, Nesma Hosny for Luxor and Aswan, Bassel Rashwan for Alexandria and the coasts) buys a ticket at the standard adult rate and walks the site at the published opening time. The point of the first visit is to take the temperature of the place — where the queues form, where the toilets are, which corner gets the morning light, whether the audio guide is worth the rental fee, what the on-site signage misses. Nothing is written on the first visit. Notes are taken on a small ringbound notebook and timed against a wristwatch — every editor at Muse Quick still uses a manual watch on site visits because phones die at the worst moments and the museum guards prefer not to see them out.
The second visit happens two to six weeks after the first, on a different day of the week and at a different time. This is the visit that produces the photograph and the draft card. The editor returns to the site armed with the first-visit notes and the specific intent of confirming the recommendations. If the side door noted on the first visit is actually closed on the second, the recommendation is dropped. If the ticket price has changed between the two visits (which happens a few times a year), the card carries the most recent figure with the rotation date. The single horizontal photograph at the entrance or the most useful approach view is taken on the second visit, with a phone — never a press camera, because the photograph is for reader recognition, not for publication-quality reproduction.
The draft card is written by the same editor within 48 hours of the second visit, while the memory is fresh. The draft goes to Engy Darwish, the fact-checker, who verifies every claim in writing. The fact-checking pass takes between two and five hours for a major site and longer if the historical context section is unusual. Engy has a master register of the standing claims across the archive — opening hours, ticket prices, named guides, named restaurants, named hotels — and the draft is checked against the register before being approved. Discrepancies are resolved with the responsible editor, sometimes with a third site visit if the contested fact is unclear.
The editorial review is the final filter. Sherif, as editor-in-chief, reads every card before it goes live. The review looks for the things the format demands and the temptations the format resists — historical context creep, padding paragraphs, opinion-without-recommendation, vague phrases like "well worth a visit" that do not actually tell the reader anything. Cards are sent back to the writing editor for re-cutting on average once in three; the second pass is usually accepted. Approved cards are scheduled into the publication slot — Sunday morning for new cards, Wednesday morning for corrections and rotation updates — and the affected reader-facing pages are regenerated.
The post-publication life of a card is where the rotation discipline matters. Every card has a re-walk date scheduled the moment it is published — at three months for major-traffic sites, six months for mid-traffic, twelve months for low-traffic. Engy maintains the rotation calendar and the responsible editors block their travel around it. Reader corrections come in throughout the inter-rotation window; the system is designed so that the worst case for a published-but-changed claim is a 24-hour window between the reader flagging it and the card carrying a correction note at the top. That discipline, more than any other single thing, is what makes the archive a usable reference rather than a stale brochure.
The total time investment per card is around twelve to twenty editor-hours across the two visits, the fact-check and the review. For a small archive of 142 cards across 34 sites, the workload is genuinely most of what four full-time editors can sustain. We do not see this format scaling to a thousand cards without losing the discipline; the archive will probably plateau somewhere around 200 cards over the next two or three rotation cycles. Whether to expand the editor team beyond the current four is the standing question; the current answer is no, because the format depends on every editor knowing every card.
The full archive is free to read on the web at the Open Cards tier. Notes Plus adds the monthly PDF compendium for offline phone reading; Field Plus adds the printed pocket booklet and the planning-desk access.
See reader tiers