Tut-tut (Sujatha)

After a long break, we finally managed a family vacation to Baltimore and Philadelphia. I wasn't going to bore you with the details of what would have been a very mundane account that any traveler could come up with, except for the fact that we paid a visit to the much-touted King Tutankhamun and the Golden Age  of the Pharaohs exhibit currently at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

 

The anticipation was built up, with a gazillion promotions and King Tut references in every nook and cranny of the city (Tutansushi anyone? A rare combination of the freshest salmon, mango, seaweed and caviar, all topped by a Mini-Pharaonic headdress- I'm exaggerating about the headdress, but some restaurant did tout their Tutansushi.)
The steps leading to the entrance of the institute had a massive  head of Tut gracing them, backdrop for countless tourist photos.  We went to the ticket desk, not quite sure that we could get the special exhibit tickets that had eluded us online (Sold out!!, screamed Ticketmaster for the date we wanted). The kind lady there assured us that yes, there were tickets available to the IMAX movie on Mummies, and yes there were tickets available for the 5:00pm entry to the special exhibit.
We had a most enjoyable afternoon, checking out the other exhibits on the human body, Ben Franklin's inventions, the science of flight. We took in the massive backdrops of the Mummies IMAX movie, which had dizzying views of pyramids, statues, reenactments of mummification and burials(tastefully done, of course, mustn't churn the kiddies' stomachs), all grave(l)ly  narrated by the ubiquitous Omar Sharif, de rigeur voice of Egypt. Some of the audience even clapped at the end of key sequences, while the rest of us sat bored and blase, bred on a diet of too much Discovery Channel and History Channel.

An obligatory stop in the store, with shopping bags of tribute to Mammon, piled high with pricey reproduction statuettes of various Egyptian gods, 'Made in China' .

Then, it was a quick walk past on a snaking path clearly designed to hold hundreds of eager visitors, now with just a couple of dozen entrants. It must have been the smile of Aten, Egyptian Sun God, shining upon our visit, I thought. With minimal fuss,we would get to see the massive funerary mask, icon of the riches of ancient Egypt, its renditions plastered all over Philly as an ambassador of Egyptomania.

We progressed through gallery after gallery, gloom lit up by brightly-illumined glass cases showing over 140 objects from the tombs. Golden jeweled dagger and sheath, presumably used by Tut himself, large wood, gesso, gold artefacts including Tut's possible great grandmother's wooden coffin and funerary mask of his mother, jewelry and jars from the tombs, canopic jars and busts of calcite, and  a tiny bejewelled coffinette, looking precisely like the face that had stared at us from all the promotional pictures and brochures.

"This can't be it!" "No, it is...I think it must be the face in the photos...Look closely!" 

My family took one glance at the tiny thing, identified as a jewelled coffinette of gold, carnelian, turqoise , glass and obsidian and moved on to the next exhibit. I lingered for a moment, noting the tape playing silently on endless loop on the 2 screens just a little beyond, showing the finer details of the face magnified on screen. That's when I realized that this was indeed the face that launched a thousand ad campaigns. What of the famed head-sized funerary mask, I wondered. As it turned out, that was still at the Cairo museum, thousands of miles away. It was not on display in this exhibition, as it had been in the 1970's, when it caused a sensation.

We walked through the rest of the exhibit, objects from the reign of later kings, with a sense of anticlimax, feeling faintly cheated. We shopped dutifully at the special Tut store set up just outside the exhibit, rather half-hearted, assured that our purchases would at least partly fund preservation and display of the treasures of Egypt, as per the blurb on our bills.

The queue to get a transliterated hieroglyphic printout of 'Melissas' and "Kevins' grew longer and longer, while few people if any paid attention to the flickering display just outside the store that detailed the painstaking precision with which the original appearance of Tut in a bust was reconstructed from MRIs of the mummy and pictures of Tut. Curiously enough, Tut was given a bronzed tone, not quite close to the chocolate color of the paintings rendering him on tomb walls or some of the painted wooden statues. (Color-blindness of sorts? Who knows? And how interesting, especially in light of the furore caused by the chocolate Jesus!)

Later, as I found out, the sense of disappointment was not misplaced, as I found similar expressions of 'we wuz robbed' at this blog. Among the many comments, one was particularly striking, saying that they had travelled to Chicago expressly for this exhibit and it took them two months to cool down after their fury at not being able to see the famed funerary mask.

Beware when the gods smile, it may be at the foolishness of mortals.

Comments

[Ruchira Paul]

This is truly hilarious. Truth in advertising, anyone? How did your kids react? Or was it more of a let down for the adults?

BTW, King Tut's missing mask completed the 600th post on A.B.

[Sujatha]

I think all of us felt let down, myself the least, since I had a closer look at the coffinette than the others. I'm sure that at $20 a ticket, the institutions hosting this exhibit would have lost a lot of money if they had made it clear that the main funerary mask wasn't in the exhibit.
It felt kind of like paying to see Mick Jagger and seeing Milli-Vanilli instead.The saving grace was that we didn't make a separate trip to Philly just to catch the exhibition, and had planned it as a trip to look at other city sights/business trip for my husband. Since we had been unable to find tickets online, we didn't really expect to see the exhibit, which had several beautiful items, except for the missing funerary mask and the pervasive air of crass commercialism in the strategically placed gift store.
600th post already? So is AB is averaging almost 2 posts a day?

[Ruchira Paul]

Not quite two posts a day. A.B. was launched on the 19th of October, 2005.