A look at how Egypt has influenced Western pop culture

Star-Telegram (Andrew Marton)

With today’s splashy opening of the Dallas Museum of Art’s blockbuster exhibit "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs," it would be shortsighted to associate Egypt and King Tut only with things ancient, archaeological or generally irrelevant to today.

This show that celebrates Egypt’s historic bigwig gets us reflecting on how different aspects of pop culture owe something either to Egypt or to the king himself.

Let’s face it: There may be no more Texas-size sign of how Egyptian legend and lore have seeped into the Metroplex than the sight of the State Fair’s Big Tex sharing his mass appeal with the Egyptian figure of Anubis, whose 25-foot-tall, 5-ton wolf’s-head-man’s-body presence hovers over the fair’s deep-fried proceedings.

The following is an arbitrary list of how King Tut and Egyptology have swept in like a Nile breeze over our pop culture lives.

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