Artifacts from King Tut's tomb will go on tour next year to mark the upcoming 100th anniversary of the discovery of the Egyptian pharaoh's resting place.
The California Science Center says the exhibit, "KING TUT: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh," will be on view at the Los Angeles museum for 10 months before heading to Europe in January 2019 as part of a 10-city international tour.
Is there any better time to revisit comedian Steve Martin's iconic, groundbreaking parody of the frenzy surrounding a touring Tutankhamun exhibit back in 1978? “I think it is a national disgrace the way we have commercialized it with trinkets and toys, t-shirts and posters,” he had said then, launching into a jazzy, upbeat number that went:
King Tut (King Tut)
Now when he was a young man,
He never thought he'd see
People stand in line to see the boy king
Almost 40 years later, the sketch was recently dragged into controversy when students at a liberal arts college in Oregon created a furore (in November) by dubbing Martin's performance as cultural appropriation; some students even told The Atlantic that the song was equivalent to n-words littered everywhere, and that the gold face of the saxophone dancer leaving its tomb was an exhibition of blackface.
The museum says the exhibition represents the largest collection of artifacts and gold from Tutankhamun's tomb ever to go on public display outside of Egypt.
It says 40 per cent of the items are leaving Egypt for the first and last time before going on permanent display at a new museum being built near the Giza Pyramids in Egypt.
King Tut's tomb was discovered in 1922, more than 3,000 years after his death.
