Hello and welcome to News Out from the BBC World Service.
Coming to you live from London, I'm James Kamarasami.
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 artifacts spanning a far greater timescale,
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 Fattah Al-Sisi 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.