Pyramid power

Recent events have kept us riveted on Egypt. But it's our fascination with the Land of the Pharaohs' ancient past that runs as wide and deep as the Nile.

Everything from our architecture to our eyeliner, but most of all our pop culture, is wrapped up in ancient Egypt.

Think about it. Plato is passé. Julius Caesar is so eons ago. But King Tut, subject of a major exhibit opening Friday at the Science Museum of Minnesota, is an everlasting icon in our cultural landscape. The boy king has already sparked 35,000 advance ticket sales, according to the museum.

Mummy movies and sendups of Tutankhamun -- whether in the guise of Steve Martin, a Discovery Channel cartoon character or a Batman villain -- are more prevalent than any depiction of Italian figures from the Roman or Renaissance eras. We see a lot more of the pyramids than of the Parthenon.

In a sense, our love affair with ancient Egypt is a matter of Cleopatra and her predecessors being so close and yet so far away.

"So much of Egypt is very familiar but a little exotic," said William K. Miller, assistant professor in the University of Minnesota Duluth's History Department and one of the state's foremost Egyptologists.

"The pyramids are so iconic that even kindergartners know them," he said. "Mummies and hieroglyphics are familiar to schoolkids. But they're also exotic in that they stand just outside Western civilization."

"Gladiator movies have been more of an attempt to retell history in the movies, whereas Egyptian movies are more fanciful," he said. "There never has been an attempt to show Ramses as he really was. Egypt looms larger, but these are made-up stories. When the history has not been translated, then you have the opportunity to say, 'Maybe this is the way it happened.'"

It was no coincidence, Silverman added, that Boris Karloff's "The Mummy" came out in 1932, exactly a decade after archaeologist Howard Carter broke through the sands of time to unearth King Tut's tomb.

And it didn't hurt, Miller added, that mummies have bodies that look well preserved. "You can almost believe that they could come back to life," he said.

Carter's discovery affected other aspects of the culture, setting off a wave of "Egypt-o-mania" in the Western world that rivaled a similar movement a century earlier when Napoleon "borrowed" a slew of structures and ancient artifacts.

Egyptian influences popped up in fashion, architecture (especially Art Deco), jewelry, furniture (animal claws) and makeup (eyeliner).

"Design reflects cultural crazes, so Egypt became kind of a craze as we were discovering these artifacts," said Tom Fischer, dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Design. "It affected all of the decorative arts."

Still, ancient Egypt's most everlasting effects have been on pop culture.

Mummy movies, whether co-starring Abbott & Costello or Brendan Fraser, have never died. Cleopatra was brought back to big-screen life most famously by Claudette Colbert in 1934 and Elizabeth Taylor in 1963, two of nearly 100 screen appearances for the Egyptian queen. (Angelina Jolie is slated to star in a new version.) And the HBO miniseries "Rome" picked up steam when Lyndsey Marshal's Cleo and her sexy asp slithered into the picture.

Steve Martin with his 1970s novelty song "King Tut" and the Bangles with their 1980s hit "Walk Like an Egyptian" had us striking poses like figures on the wall of a pharaoh's tomb. Before it became smitten with loggers and anglers, the Discovery Channel hitched its wagon to documentaries and even an animated kids' series, "Tutenstein," focused on the ancient civilization.

Victor Buono's King Tut, the villainous alter ego of a mild-mannered Egyptologist on the 1960s "Batman" TV series, endured so much through the decades that the character was brought back in later adventures, including his comic book debut in 2009.

With the buzz building for the Twin Cities Tut exhibit, which drew millions of visitors at previous stops on its global tour, that fascination shows no signs of abating.