You know how it goes.
I’ve been meaning to stop by the Field Museum to say hi to Tutankhamun, the god/king of ancient Egypt, since he opened in “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” May 26. But one thing after another seems to come up; and, before you know it, spring is gone and summer is getting small in the rear-view mirror and fall seems hellbent on becoming winter, and by Jan. 1, he’d be gone.
I stopped putting it off, went online — www.fieldmuseum.org — and bought a ticket for the next morning, a Tuesday.
I had last seen Tut, as he commonly is known, in his 1977 visit to the Field.
“Treasures of Tutankhamun” likely was the first museum show to have the hoopla and crushing crowds — 1.36 million people in just four months — to warrant the description “blockbuster.” There was no extra charge for the exhibit then, and museum admission was $1.50 for adults, $.50 for kids.
I went twice then, once to a press preview, which was great because a limited number of people meant easy, relaxed viewing. The second time was with the general public, though with a celebrity in tow [Alex Haley, author of “Roots,” published the previous year] who had limited time and wanted someone who had seen the show to point out the highlights.
We looked at the backs of people’s heads.
The experience this time showed how far the Field has come in blockbuster management over the intervening 29 years.
Up to $30
This time, Tut tickets include museum admission, but the total cost depends on senior and student discounts, extra charges for online ordering and audio tour headsets. Plan on spending up to $30 or so per person.
Tickets are sold in half-hour entry slots. My ticket was for 11:30 admission. I entered the museum early, as the 10:30s were going in and the 11s were queuing up. There had been groups as early as 8, an ungodly time god/king Tut likely would have thought. After all, he was a kid, 9 when he took the throne in 1334 B.C., 19 when he died. A museum staffer said to wander around until closer to my launch time.
I looked for a while at a case containing broken pottery and beer, milk and apothecary bottles. What was neat about them was that they had been dug up on the site of the museum, which sits on a 35-foot deep bed of landfill. There was an exhibit nearby, introduced with a pair of jeans in a case, called “Underground Adventure.” It seems that indigo dye comes from plants that grow in soil. The label said: “Without Soil There’d be no Jeans.”
I moved along and found the entrance to the permanent exhibit, “Inside Ancient Egypt,” a good backgrounder for the Tut show. You follow a grave-robber into the tombs and learn about the funerary customs that left us with the stuff of Tut.
Speaking of his stuff, only 50 of the 131 artifacts in the “Golden Age of the Pharaohs” exhibit came from his tomb, five less than in 1977. A few of his burial artifacts are repeats from the earlier exhibit, but his spectacular, solid gold funerary mask that was the icon of that show stayed behind in Egypt. The rest of the objects are from, the Web site www.kingtut.org states, “other Valley of the Kings tombs and additional ancient sites.” It’s all magnificent stuff but maybe not as Tut-tacular as expected.
Let’s make it a date
I stood in line behind a couple who seemed to be on an unlikely Tuesday-morning date, asking questions about each other that longtime couples would know. At one point in their conversation, he asked: “So is Dungeness your favorite crab?”
We 11:30s were let out of our holding pen slightly ahead of schedule and scrambled up the 22 steps to meet himself. (There’s an elevator for those who need it, but no strollers are allowed in the exhibit.) A portion of our group was let into a small, darkened room to get a taped welcome from Field President John W. McCarter Jr. He spoke on behalf of the companies producing the exhibit — the National Geographic Society, Arts and Exhibitions International and AEG Live, which is into everything from Tut to an upcoming Christina Aguilera tour. Then there was a short Omar Sharif-narrated film about the 1922 discovery of Tut’s intact tomb by British archeologist Howard Carter.
That portioning of people seemed to serve as a traffic device, like the red-to-green lights regulating the flow of cars onto an expressway.
We then flowed into a series of rooms that would lead to Tut. We saw — and those of us who spent the extra $6 on the headset heard — about his predecessor and, possibly, father, Akhenaten, who traded the hundreds of traditional gods for a single deity represented by a sun disc. In an apparently popular move, Tut restored the multiple gods. One depiction of Akhenaten is a colossal stone head with stylized features — elongated nose and ears and chin, and wide, almond-shaped eyes, a striking, absolutely royal, almost otherworldly face. By contrast, the X-ray images of Tut’s mummy seen in the last room depict a boy with a receding chin and buckteeth, visually a nerd.
The audio is keyed to 18 objects along the way. It’s easy to work the audio player, although some of the rooms are so dark — great for losing children — that it’s difficult to see the keypad.
The complex relationships in the royal families are laid out, but it started seeming too much like “Days of Our Lives” for me, so I went over to one of the stunners in the show: the coffin that once held the mummy (no mummies in this exhibit, though) of Tut’s great-grandmother. It’s huge and golden. Either great-granny was a big gal or room had been left for lots of hereafter stuff.
At the other end of the coffin scale is the delicate, exquisitely intricate box that held Tut’s internal organs. This artifact drew a lot of attention, but I still was comfortably able to have a close-up view. I noticed a young woman standing no more than about a foot from a sculpted head of Tut and staring, very much “in his face.” She was wearing a sweatshirt that said, “Naughty.”
Easier on the eyes
I’d guess that the opportunity to get so close was due to controlled crowd flow and wide spacing of the artifacts. Also the captions on cases are displayed both high and low, making it easy for children or people standing behind others to read them.
There are benches scattered throughout the exhibit, mostly available when I went through, but, as the walk-through continued, filling with bored boys 10 to 12 or so who had leaped ahead and were waiting for their more interested teachers or parents to catch up.
Less spectacular
If my memory is at all intact of the “Treasures” show 29 years ago, it seemed that “The Golden Age of the Pharaohs” is less wowie-zowie, less Tut-centric than its predecessor and, instead, more educational about the history and culture of Tut’s era. The difference in the names of the exhibits indicates that this was the intent. Archeologist Carter’s quote upon entering the tomb, “Everywhere, the glint of gold,” is reproduced on a wall in one room, but there didn’t seem to be the overwhelming glitter of the earlier show.
Maybe what has changed most in the years between the Tuts is us. The expectation of what a museum “blockbuster” should be has risen to an ever-higher, maybe unachievable, level; and a show that accomplishes just what it set out to do seems like not quite enough.
There’s a gift shop at the end, of course, as there was in 1977, although the shop then was thought of as a novelty, not — as now — an inevitability. I passed on the “Egyptian” temporary tattoos, a 9-inch Tut doll and some pretty nice ties. Instead I will take with me the cocktail party small-talk gambit: “So, did you know that, without soil, there’d be no jeans?” I’ll let that sink in and then unleash: “Would you say Dungeness is your favorite crab, or what?”
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cleroux@tribune.com
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To meet anticipated holiday demand to see the Tut exhibit before it closes, the Field is extending its hours, opening at 8 a.m. The Field will remain open until 9 p.m. on Friday, Tuesday, Nov. 22 and 25. From Dec. 20 through 23, it will be open until 11 p.m.
For daily and Tut membership viewing hours, call the museum at 312-922-9410 or check www.fieldmuseum.org. Tut’s next stop: the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, starting Feb. 3.
