Tut on Tour

The Treasures of Tutankhamun

The unmatched treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the intriguing story of their discovery in 1922, have fascinated the general public. This interested peaked in the 1970s with an international tour of The Treasures of Tutankhamun that saw audiences around the world queuing up for hours on end to get a chance to see the exhibition.

The tour began at the British Museum in London in March 1972. The exhibition stayed there for six months and was seen by 1,694,117 people. This record attendance was trampled when the tour moved onto the US, where eight million people visited the treasures in a space of two and a half years. The exhibition also traveled to Canada, Japan, the USSR, France and West Germany, with interest holding strong throughout.

It was thirty years before the next big tour of Tut relics took place. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs began with a two-year four-city US tour from June 2005, before moving onto the O2 Bubble at the Millennium Dome in London. The tour attracted nearly four million visitors in the US alone and proved so popular that a second US tour was organized. The exhibition is currently in Dallas until May 2009 when it will move onto Indianapolis and other US cities.

Theme Park Style

The current exhibition includes 130 artefacts all between 3,300 and 3,500 years old. Out of these, at total of 50 are from King Tut’s tomb, with less than 10 artefacts repeated from the 1970s exhibition. A notable absence is the boy king’s gold funerary mask which was the highlight of the 1970s tour, but which has been ruled too fragile to be moved out of Egypt ever again.

The exhibition does include some magnificent treasures including Tut’s gold diadem and a gold and inlaid stone canopic jar that contained his liver, but the exhibition has been the butt of a number of complaints. The canopic jar is artistically similar to the gold funerary mask that has become synonymous with King Tut and with ancient Egypt, and some visitors who saw it depicted in promotional material were disappointed when they realized that the mask itself was not included in the exhibition.

Vistors have also been disappointed that the exhibition differs so markedly from the 1970s show, and that the relics from Tutankhamen’s tomb make up less than half of the total exhibits. The commercial nature of the tour has also been frowned upon, with critics slating the piped music and accused theme park style of the show.

King Tut exhibitions are often prone to frenzies of excitement and commericalism. In Britain, during the 1970s exhibition, people queued for eight hours to get in, 56 million stamps commemorative stamps were issued, and the M4 motorway was closed by police so that unmarked vans could safely deliver the exhibits to the British Museum.

A New Museum

The commercial and popularist aspects of the current exhibition have allowed Egypt to raise much-needed funds for the preservation and display of Egyptian antiquities in their home setting. The money raised by the exhibition in the 1970s was earmarked for the renovation of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo but the renovations never took place.

This time round things are different, as work has already started on a new museum at a 50-hectare site near to the Pyramids in Giza. Slated to be the biggest museum in the world, the Grand Egyptian Museum will be home to 100,000 artefacts and is projected to cost $550 million. As well as money raised by the tour, further funding has come from $300 million worth of Japanese loans.

This new hi-tech home for Egyptian antiquities will be an impressive feat and a sorely needed exhibition space. The current Egyptian Museum was opened in 1902 to house collections that had already outgrown four previous homes, and the huge number of discoveries since that time – including 3,500 artefacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb alone – mean that Egypt is in dire need of a larger and more modern setting for these relics of its past.

Images by Sandro Vannini. All rights reserved.

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About The Author

Amy Smith

Last three pieces by this author:

Oxford's Mighty Ashmolean Museum

Amy studied Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at Oxford University. She is now a writer and journalist, living in London and trying to make ends meet.