Dr. Zahi Hawass- “Mummies have Magic”

   

On February 3^rd I attended a lecture at the San Diego Natural History Museum in beautiful Balboa Park. The world and TV famous Dr. Zahi Hawass (if you have seen any History Channel special on Egypt, you have seen him) came to San Diego as part of his book tour for his newest publication, “Discovering Tutankhmun: From Howard Carter to DNA.”

    Prior to attending the lecture I took the opportunity to revisit the current exhibit “The Discovery of King Tut.” This unorthodox exhibit allows visitors to explore the tomb of King Tutahkamun as archeologist Howard Carter would have seen it upon its discovery in 1922. However, the exhibit is made completely of recreations. This part seemed to upset a lot of people and I admit I was a bit shocked at the idea of paying to see fakes at first. Despite this initial hesitation, I visited the exhibit was pleasantly surprised.  To enjoy this exhibit you must first understand its purpose. This is NOT the King Tut treasures exhibit. This is the DISCOVERY of King Tut. Visitors are meant to learn about Howard Carter and his process of discovery. It’s a fascinating idea and it works well. Many know of the discovery but not of the effort it took to find, uncover, and then process the artifacts. The treasures were not just lying around in a neat and organized manner.

   The exhibit achieves this by walking guests through and showing recreations of what Howard Carter found and how he found them. The most impressive of this is the actual sized recreation of the four tombs that protected the sarcophagus. The display includes ropes and pulleys to give visitors an idea of the engineering it took to remove them carefully. Once you are done in the first half of the exhibit, you are ushered into the second half which provides you an opportunity to look at the artifacts up close. Here is where a minor but critical issue arose.

   I say this with all the respect in the world to the artists. The majority of the recreations in the exhibit are very well done. They were aged appropriately and there is a definite attention to detail. However this cannot be said of all the artifacts. Some looked lazily put together with gold leaf that was falling at the edges or paint jobs that look amateurish and brand new. There was clearly a team working on all these artifacts but it becomes obvious that some were not up to the task or got lazy by the end. Another issue I encountered was one I often find at museums, small children with their parents who are just not at the appropriate age to enjoy a museum. What made it worse was the audio guides given to each guest; after finding the way into some children's hands, they were being swung around and hit guests and or exhibits. It was something that, not only annoying to me and others, could have done serious damage.

   But finally, the lecture! Dr. Hawass is an entertaining academic with the power to make an audience as enthused as he is. This was not just a lecture of recent discoveries but also his way to call back tourists to Egypt. With the recent Arab Spring and Egyptian revolution, Egypt has suffered from a bad reputation as a dangerous place for tourists. Dr. Hawass fights against this mischaracterization of his country and explained that tourism is one of the best ways to save the Egyptian treasures that the world loves. He announced that plans to construct the largest museum in Egypt in underway to house the King Tut archive, a job that needs foreign tourism to be successful.

  However, the main theme of the lecture was the exciting recent discoveries made in Egypt. As seen in the news and in archeology publications, several tombs and public sites have just been discovered in the past months. There are also project in known sites that are hoping to uncover new information, such as the camera project in the Giza Pyramids. One project that should get everyone excited is Dr. Hawass’s work with Dr. Kathleen Martinez, from the Dominican Republic, that is hoping to find the tomb of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony. This, Dr. Hawass says, will be the discovery of the 21^st century. And it is one I can’t wait to hear about!