Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Exhibition: Tutankhamun already a success in Philadelphia

"On Saturday, a sold-out crowd of 5,000 people passed through the exhibit of nearly 130 treasures from the tomb of the boy king and other royal relatives from the 18th Dynasty.Museum staff say they expect the exhibit, on the fourth and final stop of its tour of the United States, to draw more than a million people by the time it closes in September. More than 400,000 advance tickets have been sold.Beginning at 9 a.m., pharaoh fans with reservations filed into the exhibit in groups of 300 every half-hour. To many a visitor's surprise, the morning crowd did not result in crowds in the museum lobby or a queue at the exhibit entrance."
See the above page for more.

A new summary of the exhibition and its background can be found at
http://tinyurl.com/2c8ew4 (delawareonline.com):
"For all of the hoopla -- during the press preview, representatives of the show's corporate sponsors unleashed a blizzard of superlatives and self-congratulatory back rubs -- the most significant facet of the exhibit might be the context it provides for a period many scholars of ancient Egypt consider to have been relatively uneventful.
The exhibit is a narrative experience, a chronological trail that forces visitors to pass through several galleries whose relations to Tut are indirect -- a granite statue depicts Tuthmosis IV, 'perhaps the great-grandfather of Tutankhamen'; a gilded coffin in the center of one gallery belonged to Tjuya, possibly Tut's great-grandmother."

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