Good evening everyone:

I just received a notice that the Charles Wright Museum will be showing some of the artifacts from King Tut’s Tomb. It prompted a memory.

Sometime a hundred years ago – 1982, to be exact – I had an other-worldly experience of traveling to Israel and Egypt. That alone would have been extraordinary, but it was catapulted into the unimaginable by the opportunity to accompany the family of Harold Brown, who had served as President Carter’s Secretary Defense and had played a key role in helping broker the Mideast Peace Accords among Israeli Prime Minister Begin, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and President Carter. Begin and Sadat had invited Brown to visit and carry on diplomacy-by-other-means after he left office. Brown’s daughter, Debbie, finagled my participation in the trip.

We spent the first five days in Israel – a surreal whirlwind during which we stayed at the storied King David Hotel, received a four-hour tour of Old Jerusalem from legendary mayor Teddy Kollek (with shopkeepers from each of the Jewish, Muslim, Armenian, and Christian rushing out to be with the mayor),  and spent an entire afternoon a mile south of the Golan Heights with Ezra Weisman, the commander of the Israeli Air Force in the 1967 Israeli-Egyptian War, Prime Minister Begin’s Defense Minister, and, later,  President of Israel.

Head-spinning. But that was only the first five days. The second five, in Egypt, were less political, but every bit as extraordinary. We toured Luxor, traveled by ship down the Nile to Aswan, and spent two days in Cairo.

So, back to King Tut. We had visited King Tut’s now-empty tomb in the Valley of the Kings. We decided to walk from the hotel to the Cairo Museum to see the artifacts themselves. Suddenly, a car screeched to a halt and two men jumped out. Our bodyguard immediately drew his pistol and braced himself to fire, as we all ducked. The men then shouted out, “No, no, no. Dr. Brown, Dr. Brown, we’re your students from Cal Tech.” We all looked up to see big grins. After Brown got out of his crouch, he smiled in recognition. He had served as the president of Cal Tech for the seven years prior to his joining the Carter Administration. He held out his hand and was reintroduced to his two students, who were now employed as government engineers.

So, we arrived at the Cairo Museum a bit shaken, but very glad to be there.

We couldn’t quite believe, however, just how modest the museum was by our distorted Western standards. It wasn’t that the items were neglected – it’s just that their showcasing had none of the glam and pizazz so typical of American museums:

No fancy modern lighting. No bullet-proof cases. Sculptures piled in corners. But the volume and quality of the artifacts was stunning. And there was the King Tut collection right in the middle:

In fairness, the museum would extensively overhaul its interior over the next twenty years. But it was show-stopping even before that.

Which brings me to the point. This fall, the museum will move 100,000 items to a brand-new, $300 million, architecturally-glitzy, state-of-the-art new home on 117 acres close to the Giza pyramids. The centerpiece of the new museum, which will be called the “Grand Egyptian Museum,” will be all 5,000 items in the four rooms that made up King Tut’s tomb. Designed by the Irish architectural firm Heneghan Peng, the museum has been nearly twenty years in the planning and execution.  

The vast bulk of the Cairo Museum’s 300,000-object collection will stay where it is, downtown. But this is the first time that Tut’s objects will be displayed together – many, because of their fragility, being seen for the first time.

The significance of the new edifice is further reinforced by the move of the Statue of Ramesses II, some 3,200 years old, to the museum’s entrance:

Looks like I may have visited  39 years too early. Pretty spectacular.

Rip

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