He was the "Original King of Bling."
Or so reads the 40-foot billboard in Times Square advertising the "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" exhibit that is scheduled to open at the Franklin Institute in February 2007.
The blockbuster exhibit's curator, Penn Near Eastern Studies professor David Silverman, offered an insider's look at its creation last evening to a mostly non-student audience.
The presentation was appropriately held at the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where Silverman serves as curator of Egyptology.
The lecture was the inaugural event of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt, an organization devoted to studying ancient and modern Egyptian culture.
Silverman, who is described as one of the world's foremost Egyptologists, played an integral role in the organization of the exhibit. His goal was to integrate the objects, displays and colors in to an exhibit that "tells a story."
He said that as soon as King Tut is mentioned, most people immediately think of gold, mummies or a curse.
"You never think of him as human," he said.
Getting patrons to think about the context surrounding the boy-king's reign more than 3,000 years ago is a central theme that contributed to the overall layout of the exhibition.
Silverman provided a virtual walking tour of the exhibition's seven galleries, each of which illuminates an aspect of the Tut legend and its place in ancient Egyptian culture.
The galleries range from Tut's genealogy to Egyptian religion to the mummification process.
The final gallery examines how anthropologists have used modern technologies, such as CT scans, in their research. These advances have been used to create images of how the boy-king might have appeared on his throne and to discern what mysteriously caused Tut's untimely death at the age of 18 or 19.
The exhibition is currently in Los Angeles and has received more than 930,000 visitors, Silverman said. It will make its next stop in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
However, if Philly residents are eager to investigate King Tut before the spring of 2007, Silverman hopes they will attend the "City of Amarna" exhibit, which will display excavated material from Tut's home city. It opens at the University Museum next November.
