Cairo, Apr 24 (IANS): Nearly one million people have visited the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC) since it opened to the public a year ago, according to the museum's managing executive director Ahmed Ghoneim.

About 40 per cent of the 970,000 visitors were from foreign countries, Ghoneim told Xinhua news agency in an interview.

The museum, which is located in downtown Cairo, houses a main hall, a royal mummies hall, and a textile hall.

The construction was completed in 2017 and the museum was opened to the public on April 22, 2021.

To celebrate the long-awaited opening of the museum, Egypt held a grand parade of 22 ancient Egyptian royal mummies, transporting them from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo's Tahrir Square to the NMEC.

Tourism is one of Egypt's primary sources of revenue, but it has suffered greatly since the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020 and the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Russian and Ukrainian tourists accounted for 45 per cent of all foreign visitors to Egypt in November 2021, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Khaled al-Anany has revealed.