The curse of Tutankhamun is about to be visited on one of Britain’s most cursed buildings — the Millennium Dome. More than 130 treasures from the tomb of the Egyptian boy-king, including the gold crown that adorned his head, will go on display in the Dome from November, 35 years after many were last in the country.

The artefacts attracted a record 1.7 million visitors to the British Museum then, ushering in the age of the museum blockbuster, and organisers hope that the forthcoming exhibition — the largest collection of Tutankhamun treasures assembled in the West — will be the Dome’s saviour.

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of Pharaohs comes to London after a four-city tour of the United States, where “Tutmania” drew more than three million visitors, setting records in each host city.

It will recreate the excitement of Howard Carter, the English Egyptologist, when he discovered the pharaoh’s burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings in 1922. He saw “gold — everywhere the glint of gold”. Everything a king needed in life was needed in the afterlife, which accounts for why there were about 5,000 objects entombed with him.

While previous exhibitions focused mostly on the story of the tomb’s discovery, this one places Tutankhamun in his own time, 3,300 years ago, revealing the art, politics, religion and culture of his day.

Previously unseen exhibits will include an exquisite 16-inch miniature coffin that stored the pharaoh’s liver, a particularly human depiction of the pharaoh in a wooden bust and a game board to keep him amused in the afterlife.

Twelve of the artefacts have never been seen outside Egypt but one that will not be on display is Tutankhamun’s famous death mask, because it is considered too fragile to travel from Cairo. Such is the fear of damage to the collection while it is on tour that it has been insured for a reported $650 million (£336 million).

After the original Tutankhamun blockbuster returned home in the 1970s, Egyptian archaeologists felt that moving the treasures from country to country increased the risk of damage and that they should stay on display in Egypt.

They have decided to let the artefacts out of the country to raise funds for a $500 million museum beside the Pyramids in the Giza district of Cairo.

The exhibition will also feature recent scientific studies performed on Tutankhamun’s mummy, with a special section exploring the mystery of his death in 1325BC a decade after the boy-king came to the throne at the age of 9 or 10.

Ever since the discovery of his grave beneath the sands of the Valley of the Kings — followed by the untimely deaths of some of Mr Carter’s archeological team, which led to speculation that the tomb was cursed — researchers have suggested that the pharaoh was murdered, probably by Aye, his closest adviser and his successor to the throne.

The case for the prosecution had rested on medical examinations and X-rays from the 1960s, which appeared to show a fracture in his skull. The exhibition will reflect more recent evidence, which suggests that the pharaoh died after a broken leg caused a fatal infection.

The owners of the the Millennium Dome, in southeast London, are pinning their hopes on this exhibition, expecting it to break attendance records once again.

Ridiculed as the Labour Party’s £750 million monument to “Cool Britannia”, the Dome became a national laughing stock in its year as a visitor attraction, prompting further controversy when it emerged that it was costing tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to maintain it each month after it closed.

In 2004 the Government handed the site over to a consortium led by the Ans-chutz Entertainment Group, to turn it into an entertainment centre. It suffered a setback last month when it lost out as the site of Britain’s first Las Vegas-style supercasino.

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