Tut, Seriously Folks
Ninety years since the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered, a blockbuster exhibition, viewed by nearly two million visitors across Europe to date, will bring the story to an Irish audience.
Valerie Flynn, 07 Mar 2011
Spare a thought for poor, forgotten Theodore Davis. In the early 1900s, the American archaeologist embarked on extensive excavation works in the famous Valley of the Kings. He was searching for the holy grail of Egyptology: an intact pharaoh’s tomb. But over 12 long years in the desert, Davis failed to make the discovery that could make his name. Bitter and disappointed, he declared the valley “exhausted” and sold his excavation licence to a British aristocrat, Lord Carnarvon.
Only two metres away from where Davis had concluded his last excavation lay the tomb of Tutankhamun, Egypt’s ‘boy king’, buried 3,000 years ago with rooms full of treasure to bring with him to the afterlife.
Lord Carnarvon bought Davis’s licence at the insistence of his slightly mad chief archaeologist, Howard Carter. Carter was obsessed with finding the tomb of Tutankhamun, and refused to accept the universally-held view that the tomb was long gone, emptied by looters millennia ago. On November 4, 1922, Carter made the crucial discovery.
Tutankhamun: His Tomb and Treasures, the gargantuan exhibition currently on show at the RDS, takes Carter’s moment of discovery as the starting point for what promoters MCD are billing as “a captivating journey through time.”
Over 1,000 replica artefacts have been created in painstaking detail, at a cost of €4 million, and arranged in rooms, so that the visitor can revisit just what Carter and Carnarvon would have seen when they first climbed down into the tomb. The originals are under lock and key in a Cairo museum; two statues of Tutankhamun disappeared during the recent riots, but the Egyption authorities insist that the museum has now been secured.
The RDS show’s executive producer, Christoph Scholz, enthuses that this is a new type of event, “an experience rather than an exhibition”; he doesn’t just want to teach you about ancient Egypt, he wants you to feel the excitement of Carter’s discovery as if you were there.
There’s a distinct whiff of Indiana Jones-type pluckiness in the version of Howard Carter we meet in the short film that introduces to the exhibition. However, although the exhibits themselves are more like a movie set than a museum, His Tomb And Treasures is underpinned by serious scholarship. The audio guide is hugely interesting on the different Gods, dynasties and customs referenced in hieroglyph on Tutankhamun’s many death gifts.
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