The amazing discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb

Tutmania was reborn in the 1970s with the international success of the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition. Its most important attraction, the Golden Mask, attracted more than 1.6 million visitors to the British Museum in 1972, and remains the most popular exhibition of all time. The show then traveled to the Soviet Union for two years. It then toured six US cities between 1976 and 1979, where it created such a sensation that it inspired comedian Steve Martin’s funky new song “King Tut”. In a deadpan voice, he told the Saturday Night Live audience, “I think it’s a national disgrace how we’ve marketed it with trinkets and toys and T-shirts and posters,” before performing a dance parody.

The complete grave is finally on display

From popular culture to serious academic research, the story of Tutankhamun continues to fascinate. More than a century after the first discovery, the items found in the tomb still contain mysteries that need to be solved. Elizabeth Froude of the University of Oxford told the BBC In Our Time in 2019 that less than a third of the objects found in the tomb had been fully analysed. “We’re talking about over 5,000 individual pieces, and I think that overshadows the issue a little bit,” she said. “It’s really hard to know how to manage specific object classes in the collection because there’s nothing like it.”

In 2025, the entire contents of the tomb were finally put on display in a new museum near one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Giza. Dr. Tarek Tawfiq, former head of the Grand Egyptian Museum, told the BBC: “I had to think about how we could show it in a different way, because since the discovery of the tomb in 1922, about 1,800 pieces have been displayed out of a total of more than 5,500 pieces that were inside the tomb. I came up with the idea of ​​showing the tomb in its entirety, which means that nothing is left in storage, and nothing is left in other museums, and you get the full experience that way.” Howard Carter had that over 100 years ago.”