What would King Tut do? The boy who became king more than 3,300 years ago faced turmoil not unlike the crisis that engulfed his country this month. People were angry and mystified by his father who, as pharaoh, had built a new capital city, started a new religion and even changed his name to Akhenaten in honor of a new god, Aten.
"They also were revolutionary times," said David Silverman, curator of "Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs," opening Friday at the Science Museum in St. Paul. "But King Tut seemed to go with the flow of the crowd in returning his country to the orthodoxy they seemed to want. He went back to the traditional beliefs and to Thebes, the previous capital in the south."
Those moves don't exactly certify Tut as a proto-member of the Twitter generation, but they suggest he may have had better political instincts than Egypt's recently deposed dictator.
That appeals to Silverman, an Egyptologist and University of Pennsylvania professor who has devoted much of his career to helping people understand ancient Egypt by taking them inside the mummy's tomb, as it were. For that he favors a multimedia approach using maps, posters, films, videos, lighting effects and even re-created elements to contextualize ancient objects. The St. Paul show, for example, includes a reproduction of the tent that archaeologist Howard Carter stayed in while excavating Tut's tomb, complete with a (taxidermied) canary, the pet bird the Egyptian workers believed brought them good luck.
"It's theatrical, but people love it," Silverman said. "What I wanted to do was to have an exhibition that would break down the barriers that sometimes exist between people and museums."
Silverman worked on the legendary 1970s exhibition that infected the United States with Tutmania. The present show is even better, he thinks, because it has more of everything -- more history, more objects and photos, more interactive gizmos, more authentic atmosphere and even more new research. Recent DNA studies, for example, have established with near certainty that Tut's parents were siblings. They've also proven that two mummified infants found in his tomb were his daughters.
The 1970s Tut show had just 50 objects, all from the young pharaoh's tomb. The new show also has 50 Tut objects, many of them not previously shown, plus 80 more artifacts spanning 3000 years of Egyptian history to provide context.
A dozen galleries unfold like a tour of ancient Egypt. Tut's tomb had four rooms, each re-created in the show and housing appropriate objects. They're followed by the exhibit's pièce de résistance, a rare 10-foot-tall sculpture-fragment depicting Tut's head and torso with much of its original paint intact.
