Tut's Mummy
Zahi Hawass, the publicity-hungry Director of Antiquities in Egypt, may have had an ulterior motive when he recently caused the body of Tutankhamun to go on display in his tomb.
That something needed to be done about the boy-king's mummy was indisputable. While his brother monarchs rested in air-conditioned luxury in the Cairo Museum, poor old Tut lay in solitary splendour in his gold coffin, suffering the heat by day and the cold and damp by night. These conditions did not conduce to preservation. Had he be taken down to Cairo, I don't think anyone could have complained, but to be rousted out of his golden bed to lie in a glass case - albeit a temperature-controlled one - as a gazing stock for the canaille, appears to me the height of indignity and entirely at odds with Zahi's professed determination to see Egypt's kings treated with dignity.
However, whatever his professions, Zahi's real desire is to bring as many tourists as possible to Egypt, fleece them of as much money as possible, while letting them see as little as possible. Places that were once high on the tourist list are now out-of-bounds, photography is now strictly banned wherever it can possibly be controlled, and he even dreams up such silly stunts as copyrighting the pyramids!
Having Tut's mummy on display in the tomb is the perfect excuse for stopping people entering the tomb. Previously up to 5,000 tourists a day paid extra for the privilege of climbing down the steps into the tomb and standing for 90 seconds on a wooden platform just inside the doorway before being shooed out again. Now visitors will be strictly limited to just 400 a day - lest their presence disturb or damage the mummy.
Now it is certainly true that hot, sweating tourists, panting heavily from the exertion of climbing stairs in the heat, are deleterious to tombs and even to mummies - but Tut is supposedly lying in an hermetically sealed glass case and the solution to possible damage to the tomb is proper ventilation and/or a system that seals the tomb. I can see no reason why - as has been done in other tombs - visitors to Tut's tomb cannot stand in a plexiglass box that separates them and their noxious exhalations from the delicate frescoes in the tomb.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
