Tutankhamun returns to rule London

CURATORS lifted the lid yesterday on a long-awaited London exhibition of treasures from the tomb of teenage Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, more than 30 years after he first cast his spell in Britain.

A total of 130 items are on show in Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs, including the boy king’s gold crown and a coffinette that contained his mummified internal organs. Some of the artefacts are up to 3,500 years old.

The exhibition is bigger than the one which caught the public imagination back in 1972 and features some objects from his family collection, as well as those belonging to Tutankhamun himself.

“King Tut has come alone 35 years ago to present himself with 50 artefacts, but today he came himself to present his family,” said Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s supreme council of antiquities.

More than 325,000 tickets have already been pre-sold for the London stage of the show, running from this Thursday to August 30 next. It has already been seen by more than four million people since 2005 in the US.

Most of the exhibits, 50 of which come from his tomb, did not feature in the record-breaking show that attracted eight million visitors in the US and 1.7 million in Britain in the early 1970s.

But his famous death mask, which was on show last time around, is considered too fragile to be moved and remains in the Egyptian Museum.

Prince Charles and his wife Camilla formally opened the show, the first to be staged at the O2 venue on the banks of the River Thames in south-east London, formerly known as the Millennium Dome.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered at the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, in 1922.

The London show is expected to make €6.8 million, and 75% of the income from the souvenir shop will go back to the Egyptian state to help restore and preserve the country’s monuments.