The imposing Biblioteca Publica del Estado de Jalisco Juan Jose Arreola (public library), with its crazy-quilt facade towering over fast-moving traffic on Guadalajara’s far northern fringe near the Telmex Auditorium, is home until September 23 to a fascinating display, crafted by two Italian museographers, that aims to impress and educate the world about the richest and most complete Egyptian royal tomb ever dug up by archaeologists.
“Tutankamon, la tumba, el oro y la maldicion” (Tutankamon, the tomb, the gold and the curse), although perhaps pandering a bit to our fascination with supernatural curses – not to mention “the glint of gold,” as British archeologist Howard Carter put it when he first peered inside the tomb in 1922 – is a large and beautifully mounted show that, as Mexican friends put it, vale la pena (literally, is worth the pain).
Indeed, visiting the Biblioteca Publica (part of the UdG’s new Centro Cultural Universitario), for someone living near the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara and without a car, at first seemed like a pain.
However, utilizing the app Moovit to plot my route, I felt like The Force was with me, as, riding two bus routes that snake through congested parts of the metro area, I was able to step into the show, where I was greeted by a guy in a Tut costume, an amazing 50 minutes after I stepped out my door.
Considering its distance from the center of town, “Tutankamon” attracted a good crowd on the Tuesday I arrived. (Mondays are free, but the entrance fee is a reasonable 55 pesos for seniors.)
If you surmise that the guy in the Tut costume indicates the show is aimed at kids, you would be correct. While at first I saw that as a negative – a sign the show is not for “serious” folks like me – I changed my mind as I enjoyed the broad orientation (in Spanish) that is given to the life and times of Tut and the historical significance of the discovery of his tomb by Carter.
My appreciation grew when I recalled actually visiting the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, where most of the Tut find – about 3,500 pieces – had been, amazingly, transferred by Carter. At that time (and despite the fact I had studied Egyptian art), I had little understanding of what I saw in the crowded museum in downtown Cairo, while now, in Guadalajara, I was getting a nice orientation, through videos, textual plaques and 3D recreations, not only to the politics and culture of ancient Egypt but to the momentous discovery that Carter and his patron, Lord Carnarvon, unearthed, catalogued and moved to Cairo.
However, by dint of this same interpretive freedom, the show causes its own brand of disorientation. Was the large, charming cat statue near the show’s entrance authentic? Was it truly that color and size or was it just a reproduction similar to the little cat souvenirs on sale in the gift shop just to the right? It all seemed impossible to sort out, so I finally asked a guard, who said that 30 pieces, mixed in among the show’s 170 replicas, were labeled “Original” on their bases. The ones that I found thus labeled were tiny statuettes – some of cats.
Still, organizers of the show point out that the reproductions, many of them actual size, although not of solid gold (as is Tutankamon’s funerary mask, which is no longer permitted out of the Cairo museum), were made of copper, silver, gold leaf and other valuable materials. In fact, an insurance company is one of the show’s co-sponsors.
“Tutankamon, la tumba, el oro y la maldicion” has taken a spin in other Mexican cities, where it boasted record crowds. Indeed, Tut artifacts are among the world’s best loved and best travelled – there have been several other traveling shows, of originals, in the century since the tomb’s discovery, including one hosted by the queen of England. Tut’s popularity is probably due to the fact he was a boy king who died at the tender age of 19 at the height of Egypt’s international power (around 1300 B.C.) and undoubtedly caused intense grief triggering a massive funeral that displayed the country’s recently acquired wealth, which apparently included oodles of gold. Also, of course, Tut’s rich tomb had been mostly bypassed over the centuries by the omnipresent robbers, possibly because it ended up directly under a residential area.
The case for a curse falling on those who mess with Tutankamon’s tomb is made in the last part of the exhibit on the second floor. For example, there was Lord Carnarvon’s death from an infected mosquito bite just four months after the tomb’s seal was broken. But contradictory facts are also cited, such as Carter’s reasonable longevity. In any case, the show, while recommendable, is definitely not an upper – one gruesome video briefly depicts an embalmer banging through a corpse’s nostril to extract the brain – perhaps obliging visitors to partake of the curse in at least this small way.
“Tutankamon, la tumba, el oro y la maldicion” shows until September 23 at the Biblioteca Publica del Estado de Jalisco, part of the Centro Cultural Universitario, Anillo Periferico 1695, Zapopan. Open Monday: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Tuesday to Thursday: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday to Sunday: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Cost to enter: 65 pesos; 55 for seniors; 45 for students and teachers with ID and for those under 14. Children under six and the handicapped enter free. Mondays are free to the public until 2 p.m.