LONDON (AFP) — Curators lifted the lid Tuesday on a long-awaited London exhibition of treasures from the tomb of teenage Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, more than 30 years after he first cast his spell here.
Some 130 items are on show in "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs", including the boy king's gold crown and a coffinette that contained his mummified internal organs. Some of the artefacts are up to 3,500 years old.
The exhibition is bigger than the one caught the public imagination back in 1972 and features some objects from his family collection, as well as those belonging to Tutankhamun himself.
"King Tut has come alone 35 years ago to present himself with 50 artefacts, but today he came himself to present his family," said Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's supreme council of antiquities.
More than 325,000 tickets have already been pre-sold for the London stage of the show, from November 15 to next August 30, its only showing in Europe. It has already been seen by more than four million people since 2005 in the United States.
Most of the exhibits, 50 of which come from his tomb, did not feature in the record-breaking show that attracted eight million visitors in the United States and 1.7 million in Britain in the early 1970s.
But his famous death mask, which was on show last time around, is now considered too fragile to be moved and remains in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The heir to the British throne Prince Charles and his wife Camilla formally opened the show, the first to be staged at the O2 venue on the banks of the River Thames in southeast London, formerly known as the Millennium Dome.
Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered at the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, in 1922 by Britons Howard Carter and Lord George Carnarvon.
The true face of ancient Egypt's boy king was revealed last week to the public for the first time since he died more than 3,000 years ago.
The pharaoh's mummy was moved from its ornate sarcophagus in the tomb, where its 1922 discovery caused an international sensation, to a nearby climate-controlled case where experts say it will be better preserved.
The London show is expected to make 10 million dollars (6.8 million euros), and 75 percent of the income from the souvenir shop will go back to the Egyptian state to help restore and preserve the country's monuments, said Hawass.
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