Paris celebrates Tutankhamun with a major exhibition: it is the last tour before the final return to Egypt

The Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris is hosting from March 23 to September 15, 2019, one of the highlights of the world exhibition season: it is Toutânkhamon. Le trésor du pharaon (“Tutankhamun. The Pharaoh’s Treasure”), an exhibition that comes almost one hundred years after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Luxor, Egypt, in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter, and fifty-two after the exhibition that also in Paris, in 1967, brought the treasures of the young pharaoh for the first time (it was then visited by 1.2 million people). In the year in which, as we recounted on these pages, the Getty Museum finished the ten-year restoration of the Pharaoh’s tomb, one hundred and fifty original objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb arrive in the French capital: fifty of them come out of Egypt for the first time.

This is, the presentation of the exhibition specifies, “a unique opportunity to rediscover the history of the most famous of pharaohs before the permanent installation of the objects in the new Great Egyptian Museum currently under construction”: according to reports, the objects on display in Paris will in fact never leave Egypt again after they are placed in the museum being set up in Giza (scheduled to open between 2020 and 2022). And indeed, almost as if the objects were a rock band on a farewell tour, the exhibition posters read dernière tournée mondiale (“last world tour”), and after leaving Paris the exhibition will make stops in Los Angeles, London and Sydney before the final return of Tutankhamun’s funerary trousseau to Egypt.

It is also a major commercial operation for Egypt, which through this tour is financing part of the restoration of the objects and the future Great Egyptian Museum. And for France, a highly anticipated exhibition (not least because it is presented with very bombastic announcements: it is described as the largest exhibition on Tutankhamun ever), so much so that it is already expected to be very crowded: the exhibition, even before opening, has recorded as many as 130,000 presale tickets sold. Ticket costs, moreover, are quite high: 22 euros the full price, 18 euros the reduced price for children aged 4 to 14, and 20 euros for the disabled, all raised to 24, 20 and 22 euros on weekends and holidays, respectively. For anyone who would like further information, you can visit the exhibition’s official website.

Paris celebrates Tutankhamun with a major exhibition: it is the last tour before the final return to Egypt

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