The mummy is mobilized: to date, more than 6.5 million people around the world have visited the traveling exhibition “Tutankhamun – his tomb and treasures” with a replica of the pharaoh’s tomb complex and copies of the gold finds discovered there, including the famous death mask. In the run-up to the 2008 Zurich vernissage, I traveled with other journalists to Egypt to see the originals and original locations to make the show a media event.
But what headline could we give for a double presentation compared to colleagues present at the opening of the tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor exactly one hundred years ago? In her recent book, the German Egyptologist Nadja Tomoum quotes the Daily Telegraph of January 1923: members of the press rode “on donkeys, horses, camels and other vehicles through the Egyptian desert to the telegraph” to report the news to their newspapers.
“First Global Media Sensation,” Tomoum titled this chapter – right! When the Swiss hotelier Anton Badrut received the Egyptologist Howard Carter and his patron George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon at the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor in early 1923, a reporter shouted loudly, “Lord Carnarvon! Mr Carter! Are you here to open the tomb?” February 16, 1923 is a big day, 20 invited guests are allowed to the event.
“Less than three months after the discovery of the tomb, the sarcophagus was opened and the Valley of the Kings became a world stage,” writes art historian Tomoum. Then, on November 4, 1922, a twelve-year-old water carrier stumbled upon a step carved into the rock, and Carter made a concise diary entry: “Entrance to the tomb.” He still does not want to believe in a sensation, because too often his excavations did not lead to anything – this is already the sixth and last that Lord Carnarvon wants to finance for him.
But this time, Carter finds the long-awaited tomb of Tutankhamun (1341-1323 BC). Pharaoh Akhenaten’s son (1372-1336 B.C.) ascended the throne at the age of nine and died at just under 19 years of age, presumably from blood poisoning from a broken leg. As with his ancestors, his mummy receives a magnificent tomb in the Valley of the Kings. But: “Almost all the tombs in the valley were already plundered in antiquity,” writes Tomoum, “only the burial place of Tutankhamun, by a happy coincidence, turned out to be the only royal tomb that survived almost unscathed from time.”
So, today we can admire the golden funerary art – the originals in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, or the replica of the burial chamber, along with the reproduced treasures, in a traveling exhibition that can currently be seen in Warsaw. Meanwhile, an undecorated mummy lies in the Valley of the Kings.
Nadia Thomum, “The Mystery of Tutankhamun the Golden Pharaoh and his Adventurous New Discovery”, CH Beck