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Tutmania was reborn in the 1970s with the international success of the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition. Its star attraction, the gold mask, drew more than 1.6 million visitors to the British Museum in 1972, still its most popular ever exhibition. The show then travelled to the Soviet Union for two years. After that, it toured six US cities between 1976 and 1979, where it was such a sensation that it inspired superstar comedian Steve Martin’s funky novelty song King Tut. In a deadpan voice, he told the Saturday Night Live audience, “I think it’s a national disgrace how we’ve commercialised it with trinkets and toys, T-shirts and posters,” before performing a goofy dance parody.
The complete tomb on display at last
From popular culture to serious academic inquiry, the story of Tutankhamun continues to fascinate. More than a century after the first discovery, the items found in the tomb still have mysteries to be unravelled. The University of Oxford’s Elizabeth Frood told the BBC’s In Our Time in 2019 that less than a third of objects found in the tomb had been analysed fully. “We’re talking something like well over 5,000 individual objects, and I think it’s overwhelmed the subject a bit,” she said. “It’s really difficult to know how to manage certain object classes in the group because there’s nothing like it.”
In 2025, the complete contents of the tomb were finally put on display in a new museum near one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. Dr Tarek Tawfik, former head of the Grand Egyptian Museum, told the BBC: “I had to think, how can we show him in a different way, because since the discovery of the tomb in 1922, about 1,800 pieces from a total of over 5,500 that were inside the tomb were on display. I had the idea of displaying the complete tomb, which means nothing remains in storage, nothing remains in other museums, and you get to have the complete experience, the way Howard Carter had it over 100 years ago.”
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