Golden touch

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MRS SUZANNE Mubarak joined Prince Charles to inaugurate the opening of the exhibition "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" at the O2 arena in London, writes Nevine El-Aref. To mark the occasion, the Tower of London, the Wellington Arch, the London Eye and the O2 arena were lit up in gold, while at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park a 45-ft hand-painted structure of a pyramid designed by Brazilian pop artist Romero Britto has been installed.

The organisers report that 325,000 advance tickets have already been sold for the exhibition which opens its doors to the public today and runs until August 2008. They are hoping that up to three million visitors will pass through the O2 arena by the time the exhibition closes -- almost double the number that visited the 1972 Treasures of Tutankhamun show at the British Museum.

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs features 130 artefacts from the Egyptian Museum, 50 of them from the museum's Tutankhamun collection. The exhibition is organised thematically, beginning with early royal tombs from the XVIIIth Dynasty and including artefacts from the tomb of Yuya and Tuya, the mysterious burial in tomb KV55 and the funerary treasures of Tutankhamun. Among the highlights of the show are the 40- centimetre high gold coffin for the viscera of Tutankhamun, the gold diadem from his mummy, a gold fan featuring an ostrich hunt, a small gold canopic coffin ornamented with faience, a silver trumpet used for religious ceremonies, the gilded wooden sarcophagus of Tuya, the gilded mask of Yuya, the painted wooden throne of Princess Satumun and a carved face of Akhenaten. On leaving the exhibition, visitors will walk through a replica of Tutankhamun's burial chamber.

The exhibits are supplemented by archive photographs of Howard Carter's excavation of the tomb and of workmen removing the magnificent objects found in the tomb of Akhenaten's grandparents Yuya and Tuya.

London is the seventh stop of the touring exhibition which opened in Basel, Switzerland in 2004. After London, it will move to Dallas and then New York.

photo: AFP