King Tut back in NYC

June 27, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Exhibit given CSI treatment for the 21st century

By William Weir

Hartford Courant

NEW YORK

When the King Tutankhamun exhibit first came to New York in 1979, it defined the traveling blockbuster.

Millions came to see it, and we became a nation of Tut fanatics. There were Tut books, Tut clothes and Tut jewelry. Steve Martin’s song “King Tut” became a sensation. It was the first time that the treasures from the boy king’s tomb, discovered in 1922, had come to the United States.

For the first time since, it’s back. Organized by National Geographic in partnership with the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, the exhibit opened at the Discovery Times Square Exhibition in April and runs there through January of next year.

But much has changed. Because only a fraction of the thousands of the tomb’s treasures (all 3,300 to 3,500 years old) can be included in any one exhibit, there’s a minimum of overlap.

And the exhibit, titled “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” has been given the CSI treatment for the 21st century. Among its features is the latest in forensic science on possible causes of Tut’s death at the age of 19 (thanks to a recent two-year investigation, foul play has been ruled out; now they think it was malaria). There’s also interesting information about the DNA science used to figure out Tut’s genealogy.

Whether King Tut, who died in 1323 B.C., will again draw huge crowds remains to be seen, but we offer a few observations after visiting the exhibit on a recent Wednesday morning.

Traveling blockbuster exhibits are always tricky as far as crowd management. How many people do you let in at a time? How do you keep them moving along while allowing them to see everything? One of the handlers of the exhibit crabbed earlier this year that the Discovery building was “too commercial” of a venue for something of such historical import. He would have preferred that it be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the Tut exhibit was in 1979.

But I remember going to see the blockbuster exhibit of Da Vinci’s drawings at the Met in 2003, and crowd flow there was a little dicey. At the Discovery Center, though, things seemed to move along fine for most of the exhibit. There was some bottlenecking at the end; people were lingering a little. That’s understandable, as that’s where the exhibit pulls out its show stoppers: the glitziest treasures and the aforementioned science features.

The first part of the exhibit is dedicated to Tut’s ancestors: Amenhoteps I, II and III, Akhenaten, Nefertiti, the whole bunch.

The second part is all Tut, who ascended to the throne at age 9 when Egypt was in tumult. Items you’ll see include 50 of the 5,000 items found in the tomb, as well as more than 80 items from other royal tombs. Statues, perfume containers, model ships, the coffins for holding mummified livers are among the priceless loot.

There’s also a replica of King Tut’s mummy and CT scans of the mummy.

The tomb was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter, years after archaeologists had given up hope of any major new findings in that area of Egypt.

There’s a silent movie reel taken of the excavation, but I would have liked to have learned more about the world’s reaction to the discovery.

But overall, what you get is a thorough tour of Tut’s treasures and a sense of Egyptian life at the time that’s worth the time and money of going.

Some of the proceeds go toward funding antiquity conservation in Egypt, including the construction of a new building for the country’s historical artificats.