Accidental Blogger

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.