The dazzling discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb

Tutmania was reborn in the 1970s following the international success of the Tutankhamun Treasures Exhibition. Its main attraction, the Golden Mask, attracted more than 1.6 million visitors. british museum This exhibition was held in 1972 and remains the most popular exhibition to this day. Shaw then traveled to the Soviet Union for two years. then went on tour 6 cities in the US From 1976 to 1979, the song was a sensation and inspired superstar comedian Steve Martin’s funky novelty songs. king tutankhamun. In a deadpan voice, he told the Saturday Night Live audience, “I think it’s a national disgrace that they’ve commercialized it into trinkets and toys and T-shirts and posters,” before performing a goofy dance parody.

The completed tomb is finally on display.

From popular culture to serious academic research, the story of Tutankhamun continues to fascinate people. More than a century after its first discovery, the items found in the tomb still hold unsolved mysteries. Elizabeth Flood from the University of Oxford told the BBC’s In Our Time in 2019 that less than a third of the artifacts found in the tomb had yet to be fully analysed. “We’re talking about well over 5,000 individual objects, and I think that’s a little beyond the subject matter,” she said. “It’s very difficult to know how to manage a particular class of objects within a group, because there’s nothing like it.”

In 2025, the entire contents of the tomb will finally be exhibited. new museum Near the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Dr Tarek Tawfik, former director of the Grand Egyptian Museum, told the BBC: “About 1,800 of the more than 5,500 pieces in total that had been in the tomb since its discovery in 1922 were on display, so I had to think about how we could display it differently. I had the idea of ​​displaying the entire tomb. That meant there was nothing left in the vaults, nothing left in the other museums, and it would be a complete experience,” as Howard Carter did more than 100 years ago. ”