London,

Tutankhamun And The Golden Age Of The Pharaohs

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Millennium Way, SE10 0PH

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Description: An interactive exhibition featuring treasures excavated from the pharaoh's tomb as well as other Egyptian burial sites.

Phone: 0871220 0260
Website: www.theo2.co.uk

Trains: Tube: North Greenwich, BR: Westcombe Park Railway Station

 

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Tut, tut, tut

 

Marvel: The Statue of Duamutef, one of four sons of Horus responsible for protecting the body

Sculpted: A granite statue of Tutankhamun

Organ bank: Views of The Coffinette for the viscera of Tutankhamun

Spectacular: A side angle

Watch your step: Is the gloom intended to mimic the moment of the tomb's discovery?

Look here too

• Grandmother of all shows

Tutankhamun we all know as the boy king of ancient Egypt's 18th dynasty. Described so, he seems no more remarkable than Edward VI, the boy king of England's 5th dynasty, Anne as the fat queen of the 6th and George III as the mad king of the 7th, but their antecedents reach back fewer than a thousand years to the recorded historical event of the Norman Conquest.

Tutankhamun's are lost in the mists of time more than five thousand years ago, a sequence of 32 dynasties ending with the 15 tiresome Ptolemys and the catastrophic Cleopatra. King Tut, the boy who reigned for the years 1334-1325 BC, or 1332-1323, or 1361-1352 BC (reliable authorities vary widely in their chronologies and readers may know of yet more alternatives), ruled roughly halfway through this wearying succession of royal lines, interrupted by what historians dub Intermediate Periods, and periods so uncertain that we know neither the dates of pharaohs nor the order of their reigns.

We know surprisingly little of young Tut too, though his name is so familiar that it trips easily from the tongue of every passenger on the Clapham omnibus. He died young, at 18 or so, married but childless, his death mysterious and, we supposed, sinister, as sudden and violent as murder. The discovery of his tomb, long concealed by fallen rubble, in 1922, made his a household name. Never breached by robbers, the magnificence of the artefacts within it astonished not only the arcane world of archaeology but the readers of every vulgar newspaper, and the rumours of a deadly curse on those who had so disrupted the serenity of the boy's after-life immediately made him and mummies popular. And so it has been ever since - if we know anything of mummies it is of their haunting quality and their permanent employment in trash paperbacks and horror films, none more ridiculous than that of a French pornographer whose not unwilling victims surrendered their virtue to marauding ghosts in Cairo's great museum of Egyptian antiquities. Tut too is the victim of gilt-edged and superstitious nonsense - what we really know of him is that, so young, he was the instrument of Horemheb, the general of his armies, and of Ay, his regent, who succeeded him, taking his widow as wife - hence the suspicions of murder. These we now think unfounded - examination of Tut's mummified remains suggests that he died from a compound fracture above the knee, probably caused by overturning a chariot while hunting.

The tomb that remained inviolate for more than 3,000 years contained treasure enough to honour Ozymandias (the Greek name for Rameses II, five pharaohs on), he of such great works as made the mightiest despair (according to Shelley), but extraordinary for a manipulated boy - such extravagance says much for the reverence in which the rank of pharaoh was held. Of these riches a sample is now on view in the blighted Millennium Dome (though we must now learn to call it the O2) at Greenwich.

King Tut's knick-knacks were last in London in 1972, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their discovery. One-and-a-half million of us queued to see them in the British Museum. I wondered why I was there, for I had never had even the slightest aesthetic response to things Egyptian; and when I came away I wondered again, for I had still had none and would have swapped all that rare magnificence for a fistful of drawings by obscure Italian old masters or one single bronze by Rodin. I have not since thought of that exhibition (or of Tut) and can recall nothing of it now, apart from the ubiquity of gold and my first experience of the miseries of the museum-crush in which even the standing on-tiptoe distant peep between the many heads in front cannot be had without the nudge of neighbouring elbows. In the 35 years since, the museum-crush has become an inevitability, with every exhibition promoted as a blockbuster, as the biggest, the best, the first, the only - and now that Tut is back in town and the circus barkers are at work, it is happening yet again, for Tut is the Hottentot Venus, the Elephant Man and the Bearded Lady, and in their many thousands the ignorant curious will flock to greet him in his first exposure for a generation.

Or will they? Tut himself is not there - his mummy has suffered enough from the humidity of gawpers in Egypt to risk the journey here - nor is his gold mask, the idealised portrait of the boy in gold and lapis lazuli that was placed over his mummified head and shoulders outside the bandages in which the whole body was wrapped. It was this above all things that drew the crowds to the British Museum, and this new show has nothing that quite matches it. And then there is the matter of the unprecedentedly high admission charge - £15 on the first four days of the week and £20 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And a booking fee of £1.75 for every single ticket.

Will crowds come away delighted, enthralled and determined to join an Open University degree course in Egyptology? Will stag parties be spent with the great bulk of Tut material in the vast Cairo Museum instead of boozing in Budapest or Bratislava? Will holidays be spent pursuing Tut to Karnak and Luxor instead of lazing on the beaches of the Seychelles and Sodomolinos? I doubt it. The honest among us, having experienced neither visceral thrill nor intellectual arousal, will return to our homes mildly troubled by guilt that this is so, comfort ourselves with "Well - at least we've done our duty", and settle down to the evening's television schedules and a cup of tea.

Duty? It is no one's duty to waste time and money on an exhibition the subject of which is not already close to the heart and mind. This raises the chicken and the egg dilemma. Without exposure to King Tut, how shall we know whether goods from his grave will induce wild excitement and a lifelong interest in Egyptology, or deep indifference? To this the answer is simplicity itself - a preliminary visit, with no entry charge, to the Egyptian treasures permanently displayed in the British Museum. These set Tut's treasures in context and lend the visitor some sense of what was before and after him in all those other dynasties. If, in the dusts of dry scholarship and Bloomsbury we sense no life in lifeless things that come from a land of lone and level sands, boundless and bare (Shelley again), then we should save our pennies and not go to Greenwich.

Those who do must first suffer the experience of the Dome, and its wet and windblown approach under half-amile of canted canopy that comprehensively fails to shelter the hapless traveller, the utter bleakness of the unlovely site depressing to the spirit. Inside, those who have not seen the Dome since the withering of its millennial purpose will be surprised to find that it now mimics the soulless shopping precinct of every city centre that has been pedestrianised, with the same familiar faces of café, restaurant and retailer. Quite how much of this vast tent's uncharted circumference one must trek before coming upon King Tut (follow directions to the lavatories and then another hundred yards), I am uncertain - half, perhaps, and certainly too much, for the Dome's unrelentingly commercial atmosphere colours the sane man's response to The Great King Tut Attraction. Once within, he is bound to see it for what it is - not an aesthetically thrilling experience that illuminates the high seriousness and educative purposes of scholarship, but, for blatant commercial purposes, the exploitation of a small handful of precious exhibits, many of which are no more remarkable than those in the British Museum.

To be blunt, this is less a formal exhibition than an entertainment pupped by the Ghost Train and Tunnel of Love of the fairground and amusement park. This is not altogether surprising, for one of its organisers mounts spectacular entertainments in Las Vegas and another is responsible for the National Geographic magazines that we find in the waiting rooms of dentists. Most of the show is in such darkness that we must assume, as we stumble from room to room, an intention to mimic the awesome moment of discovery; but awesome here, alas, it is not - merely a deep gloom that will be the cause of accidents, as will the too narrow and too steep stairs that link the two floor levels over which this meagre display is thinly spread. Since, at the press view, critics and journalists were harangued like infants and herded like sheep, I can only suppose that the far more crowded experience of the public will be doubly hazardous and unpleasant.

Some exhibits are savagely top-lit, shadows both distorting and concealing the craftsmen's original intentions; others, many of them figures in the round, are blasted with full-frontal light that prevents scrupulous examination from any other view. Nowhere, among all the bland labelling, are we much enlightened about the craftsmen themselves, their tools, techniques and materials. The exhibition catalogue - or rather the misleading Great Tome of Tut - is a by-product of the National Geographic Society, researched (!) by them, and written and produced in their characteristically glossy fashion, with too much lettering in white on black and the images of the exhibits and other illustrative material so dramatically lit, trimmed and distorted in scale as to subvert any true impression. Designed for credulous American readers and couched in the beguiling language of the "Roll up, roll up!" that compels the gullible to see the freak, "this stunning companion book" brings us "for the first time ever ... face to face" with a latex model of King Tut himself.

For those with sensibility tough enough not to be distracted by this crass exploitation of Tutankhamun and its wholehearted dependence on such trappings of presentation and commerce as should never be countenanced by a responsible museum, there are the rewards of pathos (Tut is without doubt a pathetic figure) and a handful of beautiful objects gathered together in a harsh and theatrical display by organisers who refer us to their website if we want to "explore more King Tut mysteries" or wish to buy a DVD of The Pharaohs' Curse. I am inclined to say that the minds behind this exhibition and the Dome deserve each other; between them they offer the most unpleasant "cultural" experience of my life.

• Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs is at the O2, North Greenwich (0871 984 0002) until 30 August 2008. Daily 10am-7pm. Admission: Mon-Thurs £15 adult, £7.50 child, £10 family (2 adults, 2 children). Fri-Sun £20 adult, £10 child, £13.25 family. Concs available. Prices exclude £1.75 booking fee. www.theo2.co.uk.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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