TREASURED

How the discovery of Tutankhamun’s grave has resonated in cultural and political history well into the present.

As a point of departure, Riggs, the author of multiple books about ancient Egyptian culture, uses the lessons she learned about King Tut in her rural Ohio public school, knowledge that led to an enduring fascination with ancient Egyptian history and subsequent profession as an Egyptologist. As her teacher scrolled through the images on the projector, “something wonderful shimmered into view,” writes the author, echoing the supposed utterance of the original discoverer, Howard Carter. “Ten years old and miserable, I had never seen anything so splendid and surreal. I had to know more about this Tutankhamun and his tomb in the Valley of Kings, not knowing, not able even to imagine, how it would change my life.” The author moves from the thrilling excavation led by Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon, through the puzzling dynastic antecedents of Tut and his brief yet glorious life 3,000 years ago. Riggs also examines the “Tut-mania” that followed the discovery of his grave and how his story “has as much to do with geopolitics, post-war utopias, and consumer capitalism as it does with priceless treasures, thrilling discoveries, or hidden burials.” Resurrected in the 1960s, the King Tut exhibit was first promoted by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy at the National Gallery of Art, which spurred subsequent tours and established a complicated, interconnected web of celebrity archaeologists, blockbuster exhibitions, and global geopolitics. “By the 1970s…as the Middle East peace process and free-market economics entangled Egypt with America,” writes the author, “Tutankhamun did the diplomatic work of presenting his homeland as a friendly face and worthy ally.” At the time, she continues, there was “a concerted effort to educate Americans about the region and cultivate a positive attitude towards Egypt and the Arab world, the source of the oil on which the American way of life depended.”

An imaginative weaving of the personal and political into a fresh narrative of an archaeological icon.