New York City was the exhibit’s last stop on a two-year, six-city U.S. tour that had begun in Washington, D.C. In every city in which it appeared, it was a blockbuster, selling out tickets within hours and smashing attendance records well before it traveled on to the next museum. It drew people from all ages and backgrounds, many of whom had never spent much time in a museum before, but all of whom were willing to wait in line for hours, no matter how cold, rainy, snowy, or hot the weather.
Unknown to the crowds thronging the display was the fact that without the work of a French woman archaeologist named Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, they almost certainly would never have gotten the chance to see the vast cornucopia of riches found in the young pharaoh’s tomb more than fifty years before.
In the early 1960s, Desroches-Noblecourt, the head of the Egyptian antiquities department at the Louvre, spearheaded an international campaign to save more than a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from being swallowed up in the waters of the massive new Aswan Dam. In a gesture of thanks to her and France, Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser authorized the first-ever major exhibition of Tutankhamun’s treasures outside his country since the 1922 discovery of Tut’s funeral chambers.
Curated by Desroches-Noblecourt and accompanied by a blaze of publicity, the “exhibition of the century,” as the Tutankhamun show was dubbed, opened at Paris’s Petit Palais on Feb. 17, 1967. The following days and weeks saw mammoth crowds waiting for hours in long serpentine lines. By the time the exhibition left, more than 1.25 million museumgoers had viewed it.
The overwhelming response to the Paris exhibition set off an international frenzy; every country and major museum wanted to be the next to host the show. Britain was awarded the second display of the treasures in 1972, and the Soviet Union was next in 1973. The United States finally got its turn in 1976.
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