Tutankhamenophilia

There are two ancient Egyptians whose names everyone knows: Queen Nefertiti and her son-in-law King Tutankhamen. Nefertiti is a limestone bust, Tutankhamen a treasure. Nothing in his reign, which began around 1361 B.C., when he was ten, and ended with his death at 18, could have secured immortality for this shadowy boy-king. King Tut owes his fame to the accident that grave robbers never looted his tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. It remained intact until Nov. 26,1922, when an English archaeologist named Howard Carter chipped through a door at the end of a rubble-filled passage and thrust a candle into the darkness beyond. "Do you see anything?" asked Lord Carnarvon, his partner. "Yes, wonderful things," Carter stuttered.

What he saw was a glimpse of the world's most legendary treasure: the stupendous array of gold shrines, jewels, portrait masks, gilded pharaonic furniture and sarcophagi that had gone down with Tutankhamen into the dark. It was the first Egyptian royal tomb found almost intact. Tutankhamen's treasure was eventually rehoused in the Cairo Museum. Parts of it made excursions to France, Japan and the U.S. Two weeks ago, the biggest collection of individual Tutankhamen objects --some 50 pieces--ever to leave Egypt went on display at the British Museum.

Unmarked Vans. No show in the staid B.M.'s history ever generated such fuss or demanded such elaborate preparation. First, a firm of English packers spent five weeks in Cairo crating the treasures--each wrapped in cellophane, encased in plastic quilts, set on a foam cushion tray and finally shut in a carpeted crate. The museum stepped up its security precautions. When this groundwork (estimated cost: $900,000) had been done, the 41 crates were flown at night from Cairo in two BOAC freighters and one R.A.F. jet, then secretly whisked to the museum. Fearing hijackers, the English authorities took the extraordinary step of closing the M4 superhighway that links Heathrow to London until the unmarked vans had gone through. Such measures were compelled by the probable value of King Tut's treasure: his gold funeral mask alone, some English experts speculate, is worth over $50 million.

The English, normally phlegmatic about art, greeted the event with ecstasies of Tutankhamenophilia. Tut appeared on posters, postcards, carrier bags and 56 million commemorative stamps; the B.M.'s supply of replicas of Tutankhamen's jewelry was sold out on the first day. Bottlenecks in the museum caused three-block queues outside it. The museum hopes that when the exhibit closes six months hence, 1.5 million people will have seen it. That would net about $1.3 million, most of it earmarked for a UNESCO fund to restore the temples on the island of Philae in Egypt, now submerged in the Nile by the Aswan High Dam.

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