Five tips for the Tutankhamun exhibition

The last Tutankhamun show enthralled an entire generation and little wonder, writes Rachel Campbell Johnston. As if the world of the pharaohs wasn’t already exciting enough with its scarabs and cobras, its falcons and sphinxes, its bandaged corpses and its brain-extracting hooks, here was the mystery of a handsome boy king and his tomb full of treasures. Here were rumours of murder and a real-life mummy’s curse. No wonder the British Museum’s 1972 show set the turnstiles spinning. It attracted more than one and a half million visitors. The modern-day blockbuster exhibition was born.

Now, like some cross between a Rolling Stones come-back and a new Tintin adventure, the next Tutankhamun show arrives in our country. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs opens this week at the O2 centre. Can it match up to the visions that glimmer in the Aladdin’s cave of our excitable imaginations? Or have expectations been cranked to unrealistic levels? More than 325,000 people have already bought tickets to find out. Are they about to bear witness to the latest curse of the Dome?

A big plastic bubble hardly seems a happy substitute for a pyramid but what this show lacks in natural setting, it more than makes up for in artificial atmosphere.

From an introductory voice-over by Omar Sharif through the sort of piped music that accompanied a Liz Taylor Cleopatra to the Pharaoh’s Palace lounge bar at the end of the exhibition, designers shamelessly camp up the Egyptian mood. Mostly it’s tacky. Forget the hushed atmosphere of a scholarly institution. Think: Tutankhamun goes to Hollywood. This is a rapaciously commercial show. It charges you £20 a pop and shamelessly peddles the most ridiculous King Tut tat in its shop – including its bad-taste bestseller: a sarcophagus tissue box that dispensed its contents through one nostril.

Try not to be put off. This exhibition, about twice the size of the last Tutankhamun show, displays some 130 of among the most historically important objects in the world. About half of these are not from Tutankhamun's tomb – or even from his reign for that matter. They are there to set a short-lived (he died at 19 after only about ten years on the throne) and actually fairly insignificant pharaoh in the context of his family and the historical period that their dynasty defined.

It’s a case of meet the folks (as far as we can actually know who they are) from Ahmenotop II, his putative great-great-grandfather, the warrior ruler of an empire that covered much of the known world, to Akhenaton, his father, the so-called “heretic pharaoh” who broke with age-old religious tradition. For the first time in recorded history there are records of a single god.

This was a fascinating period and it is brought to evocative life (or uncomfortable death if you happen to be a Nubian enemy underfoot of an enthusiastically trampling pharaoh) by a selection of exquisitely crafted and densely symbolic objects that offer insights into anything from changing religious beliefs to their accompanying aesthetic shifts, from the significance of the river Nile to a delight in visual puns, from ostrich hunting practices to the application of cosmetics. Maps and photographs help to explain and though the accompanying texts are concise someone seems to have struggled to put in more than the bare minimum.

What you really have to do - if you can ignore the noise of the audio-guides buzzing about you like a cloud of Nile mosquitoes – is focus hard on the objects. Walk round them. Read their details. Admire their immaculate craftsmanship. It is here – in the actual objects - that the clues to this exotic culture lie. What this show, with the luxury of something like 200,000 square feet at its disposal, can at the very least offer us is a chance to study them properly. A monumental and entrancingly beautiful sculpted head of Ahmenotop, for instance, is given not only its own gallery but its own pillared approach. It merits the ceremony. It is a masterpiece.

But what about the tomb treasures? Do we get our own mini-version of the Howard Carter experience? Do we sense that frisson which the great archaeologist surely felt way back in 1922 when, by flickering candlelight, he first squinted into a chamber undisturbed for 33 centuries. "Can you see anything?" hissed the impatient Lord Carnavon, from behind him. It was all Carter could do get out the words. “Yes … wonderful things,” he supposedly whispered. “Gold … everywhere the glint of gold…”

The visitor descends to a second level of this show – to galleries dedicated exclusively to the boy king’s burial treasures. Only a fraction of the more than 5,000 excavated objects can be shown. Among these there are a handful of star pieces: the snaking cobra diadem that protected the mummified pharaoh, the precious gold dagger that lay by his side, the falcon-shaped pectoral that wrapped his royal neck, the inlaid collar that he wore when first crowned. They have a glint – though even amid the surrounding darkness not quite of the brightness that some might expect. Egyptian gold, apparently, has a high iron content that gives it a burnished red depth. But still many will feel swindled not to see the face that launched a thousand museum queues.

The totemic gold mask that caused impassable bottlenecks in the last Tutankhamun show is apparently considered too fragile to leave Cairo. The golden image that gazes, kohl-eyed, from all the advertising material is actually a blown-up depiction of a miniature coffin made for the liver. Examine this closely and you will see that, actually, it is one of the most spectacular objects in this show. But still, if it’s the boy king’s bling you are after this show will probably disappoint.

This exhibition is less about the glint of treasure than about the man behind the golden mask. It is less about distant admiration of mythical splendour than about discovering more intimate truths. It is the story of a boy with a shy, bucktoothed smile who succeeded in presenting himself as a splendid living god before his final transformation into the poor crumpled leathery creature so recently revealed beneath unravelled bandages.

This show is at its most moving where it is most intimate. Look at the delicately engraved little shrine for a statue, for instance, and study its images of Tutankhamun and his queen (who was probably also his half sister – and hardly surprising he should take her if an entrancingly beautiful statue of her own sister bears any family resemblance). See the slender boy king pouring wine for his wife; watch her tying on his heavy collar or anointing his skin; witness the tenderness in the mutual touch of their hands. No more intimate picture of a pharaoh’s life exists.

Imagine Tutankhamun opening his pretty cosmetic box in the shape of a gracefully trussed goose or pressing his hand hopefully to some little scarab charm. Look at the miniature funerary mask for a foetus that may well have been intended for one of the two stillborn daughters who were buried along with him. Or examine the lovely little game box that the boy king took with him to the afterlife much as a modern boy might take his PlayStation on holiday.

So try to forget all the Hollywood-style trash. Let your imagination run its own course. There are plenty of treasures in this show which can still annihilate, as Carter put it, the passing of 3,000 years.

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