When the exhibit came to LA in the late 70s or so, my mom had the foresight to get a membership just beforehand which got us the VIP entry.
Yeah, it was the 70’s now that you mention it. I was still in college.
Thanks
I saw the mask when it was on tour in England in the early 70s.
I don’t think the Egyptian gov’t lets it leave Egypt any more.
It featured in a series of Doonesbury cartoons.
Me too, and I can understand. Imagine a plane crashing or a ship sinking with these treasures.
I saw the King Tut exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC during that tour. I think it was a school field trip.
BTW, a former UK curator has a theory that the tomb of Queen Nefertiti is just beyond the walls of Tut’s tomb. (She was his stepmother.) But accessing it, if it even exists, might require destroying the plaster artwork on the tomb wall. Gift link to an article about this theory.
There were two big tours of Tut artifacts. The one in the 70s was more spectacular because and had the mask. The one in the 2000s I went to and it was still very impressive.
From watching the new Tut documentary on PBS there is still some debate as to what Nefertiti’s relationship to Tut actually was.
I saw the King Tut 70s tour at the Field Museum in Chicago with a group of friends (a local Star Trek club,oddly enough). I remember that the gold mask was in a glass case all by itself in a room, so you could walk completely around it. Very impressive.
I thought they used ground-penetrating radar or something and decided there was nothing there.
There was a National Geographic(?) article where they had used DNA to establish who was related to whom in the mummy cache, along with their relationship to Tut.
I’ve visited the museum in Cairo and I’m a Londoner, so naturally I’ve been to the British Museum a couple of times. Cairo has the best single item, the golden mask, but both collections are spectacular. London has the Rosetta Stone, which has nothing to do with King Tut, but is an amazing artifact.
How’d you get so funky?
My most memorable part of visiting the Cairo Museum was that there was no running water in the ladies’ washroom sinks. My wife had to use sanitary wipes. Oh, and they had the largest collection of mummies including Ramses II himself.
But there was a number of mummified animals in the one room too - including the one labelled as a crocodile “mummified by means of a turpentine enema”.
They have not only the mask but much of the rest of the Tut treasures. His massive sarcophagus (not there) was enclosed in three separate nested decorated boxes/enclosures displayed separately. There were funeral goods and furniture and a disassembled chariot, his walking canes, etc.
We were lucky(!??) enough to visit a year after the Arab Spring. This scared away so many that the sites were deserted. In a number of Valley of the Kings tombs, we were the only ones there. I think the most there was in any tomb was half a dozen tourists. Yet the tombs are laid out to accommodate a non-stop crowd and it used to involve waiting in the hot sun for up to half an hour for each tomb. Similarly for Giza - I was told that before, you could barely move for the crowds, but there was barely anyone there. We had the temples at Abu Simbel all to ourselves for about 10 minutes, as we were the only private tour and the rest of the plane was on a group tour that started with the multi-media presentation. And so on…
Anyone who has the chance, I strongly recommend a tour of Egypt. Particularly, because so much of their economy depends on tourism. Someday I would like to see what they’ve done with the new museum.
The PBS special I mentioned above shows some of the museum. It looks incredible
It would be interesting to do a DNA check to see if there was a genetic reason for the deaths - I know I was reading another site back a few years [Quora? maybe] and some people were claiming the whole inbred thing, but given the mad array of contaminates in food/air/water I would not be surprised if there was something other than amorphous ‘inbred’ as a cause of death. I mean, bare feet and walking on dirt can lead to all sorts of systemic infections, flying insects and whatnot.
I remember being taken to NY when the Tut exhibit was touring, the wait time was well worth it. I was disappointed not to get the ‘coffee table book’ that was in such demand.
Probably you can get the book very cheaply now on Amazon or eBay.
True, but when I was younger it was a great disappointment =)
To be fair - Tut had medical problems, like a club foot; among the grave goods were several of his canes. But apparently one of his bigger problems was malaria, not exactly genetic unless poor immune system was an aggravating factor. But he was married to his half-sister.
OTOH, he was the end of the line, dying at age 18 without surviving heirs. One of the generals took over as pharaoh after him. Fresh blood.