The return of Tutankhamania

It was the year that T-shirts with political slogans came in big. Cosmopolitan, the first women's magazine that dared to talk about the female orgasm, was launched in the UK. Crossroads, the television sitcom where the acting was more wooden than the wobbly sets, hit the airwaves. Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in a classic Cold War match in Reykjavik to become America's first world chess champion. The fey drawings of a naked man with a wispy beard announced the institutionalisation of the sexual revolution in Dr Alex Comfort's illustrated The Joy of Sex manual. Polaroid cameras were the cutting edge of technology, and The New Seekers came second in the Eurovision Song Contest with "Beg, Steal or Borrow".

And yet 1972 is not really remembered for any of these things. Rather it was the Year of Tutankhamun (when we learnt the ancient name rhymed with " moon", consigning the traditional British pronunciation of Tutankhamen to the dustbin of history). That year the people of Britain were seized with a feverish enthusiasm for Egyptology, which would nowadays probably be described as Tut-mania. One scribe went so far as to coin the term " Tutankhamunophilia".

The cause of this wild enthusiasm was an exhibition of artefacts from the boy pharaoh's tomb, which was installed at the British Museum in March 1972. It ran for almost a year and attracted 1.7 million visitors. People queued for up to eight hours to catch a glimpse, through crowds of their equally eager fellows, of the glittering treasure trove discovered 50 years before by the British archaeologist Howard Carter.

This was when the phrase "blockbuster exhibition" was coined, and defined. All other events, and all other manifestations of public curatorial excitement since then, have been judged by the Tutankhamun yardstick. The blockbusters have come and gone - Cézanne, Monet and all the rest - but King Tut remains the nation's most popular exhibition ever.

This week, plans for another Egyptology-fest in London will be unveiled. The Anschutz Entertainment Group is blowing trumpets for a "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" exhibition, which will open in November at The O2, the venue formerly known as the Millennium Dome. It's fairly safe to predict it will not cause the same fuss. The explanation for that lies as much with the epoch of the early Seventies as it does with the intrinsic merit of antiquity's best-known, yet most mysterious, pharaoh.

The Sixties, as a mythical era, did not coincide with the calendar period of the same name. The Sixties began in 1963, sometime between the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Beatles' first LP, and carried on until 1972, or perhaps even the year after that. It was a time of affluence and full employment, of flower-power and counter-culture, of the civil rights movement and exotic Eastern religions, of both social and sexual unzipping.

But already by 1972 there was a sense that things were coming to an end. On Broadway, the archetypal hippy musical Hair closed after 1,752 performances. The flowery kaftan had finally given way to crushed velvet loon pants. The US at long last pulled its troops out of Vietnam, after Jane Fonda toured enemy territory and was photographed sitting fetchingly on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun - and also after the North launched its heaviest attack against the South for four years and crossed into the Demilitarised Zone. Washington for a while continued, of course, to bomb the hell out of the place. But towards the end of the year the television programme M*A*S*H made its debut, and the war was all over bar the shooting.

Britain was, thankfully, an altogether duller place. Our idea of military conflict was for the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, to station the Royal Navy to protect British trawlers off Iceland in what came, with typical British bathos, to be called the Cod War. At home we had industrial unrest with a national dock strike and a miners' dispute that plunged the nation into darkness, necessitating the comeback of the candle. We also joined the Common Market or European Economic Community, as Prime Minister Ted Heath preferred to call it. Dull days. A golden sarcophagus (indeed one of the greatest examples of the goldsmiths' art in history) containing 200kg of gold and encrusted with lapis lazuli, turquoise and cornelians, was just what was needed to brighten up our boring British lives.

And Tutankhamun was just the job. He was, after all, a boy-pharaoh, and this was the age of youth. His chart rivals were Donny Osmond, who stayed at No 1 for five weeks with "Puppy Love" (beaten later in 1972 by his nine-year-old brother Little Jimmy Osmond, whose search for a "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool" became the Osmond family's biggest British seller) and an Afro-hairstyled Michael Jackson in the days before he had to pretend to be a child. Tutanhkamun was a golden youth from a golden age.

No one was certain when his reign began - because no one was sure whether "this son of a king", as his funereal inscriptions had it, was the son or grandson of the Pharaoh Amenophis IV, who died around 1335BC. But he was just nine or 10 when he came to the throne. Just as fittingly in an age in which heroes died young (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison were all recently deceased) this shadowy boy-king seems to have died around the age of 18. Photographs of his famous golden and blue-striped death mask suggested an attractively androgynous appearance. He offered the mystery that ought to attach to royalty at a time when the best the British Royal Family could offer was Princess Anne becoming Sports Personality of the Year a few months previously.

Serious historians suggested that Tutankhamun's period on the throne was of only moderate significance. He was a pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom, who ruled from 1333BC to 1324BC - a time when the wealth of the Egyptians was in decline.

His chief memorable act seems to have been to overturn the religious changes instigated by his predecessor Amenophis IV, who was also known as Akhenaten and who had turfed out the pantheon of traditional Egyptian deities and replaced them with a single deity, the sun god, Aten, ushering the world's first monotheistic religion (as Key Stage 2 of the National Curriculum will now tell you).

The priests of the other deities didn't take kindly to this, and when Akhenaten died they staged a revolt which persuaded Tutankhamun's vizier, a chap named Ay, to bring back the old gods. So the boy-king changed his name from Tutankhaten, meaning "Living Image of Aten" to Tutankhamun, which meant "Living Image of Amun" (Amun was the previous top god). Ay, interestingly, got the job as pharaoh when King Tut met his untimely end.

But it was none of this which led the people of Britain to take Tutankhamun to their hearts. It was the romance of the discovery of what is probably still the richest tomb of all time.

There was some plucky British perseverance about that. In 1907 an American archaeologist named Theodore Davis had found an underground chamber containing a few objects stolen from the tomb not long after the burial. Contemporary robbers had broken into the grave and removed some treasures, which they had buried nearby while they went off to get some transport. While they were gone, according to the celebrated Egyptologist Dr IES Edwards, who was the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum in 1972, a chap called Maya was not far away. He was the Superintendent of Building Works in the Necropolis and he swiftly resealed the tomb and brought the thieves to book.

Because Tutankhamun died young there was no tomb ready for him. So he was given one that had been prepared for one of his officials. That meant it was on the valley floor and not in the rock walls of the valley side, like the other royal tombs. Its entrance was soon covered by wind-blown sand. And after the first heavy rainfall, which came every 10 to 15 years, it would have been buried under a layer of mud. Once baked dry by the sun, it would be utterly indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain.

Theodore Davis carried on looking for the grave in the Valley of the Kings but after seven years gave up. His licence to dig was taken over by his British rival, Howard Carter, who dug in vain for another six years. At that point Carter's patron, the Earl of Carnarvon, decided he had wasted enough money, and tried to call the dig off. Carter persuaded him to fund one more season's dig. That year, 1922, they found it.

"With Lord Carnarvon standing beside him," wrote Dr Edwards in Burlington Magazine in 1972, "he made a hole in the blocking of the doorway embossed with the seals of the Necropolis inspectors and of Tutankhamun. He inserted a candle and peered inside: 'everywhere the glint of gold', and in reply to Lord Carnarvon's question whether he could see anything, it was all he could do to get out the words 'Yes, wonderful things.'"

Fifty years on the British public could only agree. What was presented to them was the world's most legendary treasure - a stupendous array of gold ritual objects, jewels, masks, gilded pharaonic furniture and sarcophagi that had gone down into the dark with Tutankhamen. There was a golden bed with sides in the form of cows, for it would be the cow deity who would carry the dead pharaoh up into the sun, along shafts of light to which the sides of the Pyramids gave magical representation. And the British Museum's admission charge to see it all was a trifling 50p (it had been 10 shillings until decimalisation the year before) per person.

But more than that, the contents of the grave, which included the mummies of Tutankhamun's two stillborn daughters, told a tragic love story. The flowers Carter found on the golden mask of the mummy had lain there undisturbed for 3,000 years, placed, he speculated, by the pharaoh's widow Ankhesenamun, who was also his half-sister, just before the closing of the casket. The imagination of the British public was fired.

To add to that was the extraordinary logistics of getting the ancient objects to London. It took five weeks for a firm of English removal men to crate the treasures to Cairo. Each one was wrapped in cellophane and then enfolded in plastic quilts. These were put on foam cushions and placed in crates lined with carpet. They spent £250,000 on the packing alone.

The 41 crates were then flown at night from Cairo in two BOAC freighters and one RAF jet. So precious was the cargo that the British police closed the M4 to all other traffic to allow the unmarked vans to pass without fear of hijacking. The gold funeral mask alone, it was said, was worth more than $50m - at 1972 prices.

"The English, normally phlegmatic about art, greeted the event with ecstasies of Tutankhamenophilia," observed a reporter from Time magazine in 1972. "Tut appeared on posters, postcards, carrier bags and 56 million commemorative stamps; the BM's supply of replicas of Tutankhamun's jewellery was sold out on the first day. Bottlenecks in the museum caused three-block queues outside."

To add to the ferment there was the enigma of how the boy-king had died. There was much speculation that he had been murdered, possibly by his successor, Ay, by his chariot driver, or even by his wife. A small loose sliver of bone had been found inside his skull, which, some suggested, might have come from a blow to the back of the head.

Awkward political leaders, the people of Britain in 1972 knew, were killed. Che Guevara, who had been shot dead four years earlier, was still very much in the political consciousness, as posters in student bedsits across the land revealed. And the truth was not always told about such matters; 1972 was also the year that Watergate began.

In 2005 Tutankhamun's body was subjected to 1,700 CT scans which showed - how prosaic real life can be - that he died when gangrene set quickly in after a break to his leg, probably from falling form a horse or chariot. There was no evidence whatsoever that he had been struck in the head.

Such mundanity, though, would not have dispelled the public's 1972 thirst for the exoticism of the East. At a time when the best the real Orient could offer was a visit by President Richard Nixon to meet Mao Zedong in China, the mummies of Ancient Egypt exerted a far more powerful fascination.

There was even the possibility of a curse. There had long been reports of the "early death" of those who had first entered the tomb and disturbed the eternal sleep of the dead pharaoh. The fact that Howard Carter inconveniently lived another two decades is overlooked.

Carter is buried in Putney Vale Cemetery in west London. On his gravestone are incised words that, 3,000 years earlier, were inscribed by some unknown Egyptian artisan in the wishing cup of Tutankhamun:

May your spirit live,

May you spend millions of years,

You who love Thebes,

Sitting with your face to the north wind,

Your eyes beholding happiness.

It was a benediction which in 1972 cast a spell over much of the population of Britain.

"Schoolchildren, senior citizens, dedicated Egyptologists and the just plain curious queued happily that summer," as Ancient Egypt magazine put it. On websites today those who were there jostle with their remembrances of the time.

"I queued in Great Russell Street," says one. "Not only do I vividly remember queuing at the British Museum (and I always point out where the queue snaked outside when I take my kids there), but I still have the wonderful catalogue."

"I have no memories of the Tut queue," says a third, "all memories of the queue were wiped out once I got inside."

And so it was. While US astronauts that year had to make do with journeying to the mere Moon in their Apollo rockets - bringing back a cargo of lunar rocks by way of proof of their destination - Tutankhamun, his body still in Egypt, the land of his birth, where it has always remained, was journeying with the sun god.

For a few brief months the people of Britain went there with him.

Been there, seen that, got the postcard: other blockbuster shows

THE GENIUS OF CHINA

Royal Academy, 29 September 1973 to 23 January 1974

771,466 Visitors

Hot on the heels of the British Museum's phenomenal success with Tutankhamun, the Royal Academy was quick to unveil this exhibition about another equally mysterious civilisation. The 1970s show overlooked modern-day China, displaying instead a collection of archaeological finds from the People's Republic. In the post-Cold War era there was so much enthusiasm for any information about "closed" Communist states, there followed a rush of 750,000 to see the artefacts.

MANET TO PICASSO

National Gallery, 22 September 2006 to 23 May 2007

725,541 visitors, so far

The National Gallery has attracted record-smashing crowds to this display of some of its loveliest and best-known modern canvases. Using works from its permanent collection, the rehang has been housed in the Sainsbury Wing, which opened in 1991 to display temporary exhibits. The six rooms include masterpieces from Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh and Cézanne.

VELAZQUEZ

National Gallery, 18 October 2006 to 21 January 2007

302,520 visitors

Spanish fever gripped London this winter when the first significant show of Velázquez's work hit our shores. Featuring around half of the artist's surviving paintings, many from Madrid's Prado, it pulled in the gallery's highest attendance figures for a paid-for exhibition.

MATISSE AND PICASSO

Tate Modern, 11 May to 18 August 2002

467,166 visitors

This immense exhibition drew the Tate's largest number of visitors for a single exhibition. Put together in collaboration with Moma, the Pompidou Centre and the Musée Picasso, the show combined works by the artists dating from the beginning of their friendship, in 1906, to after Matisse's death in 1954, when Picasso paid tribute to him in his work. The show later travelled to New York and Paris.

TURNER WATERCOLOURS

British Museum, 9 May 1975 to

1 February 1976

585,046 visitors

The British public's appetite for exhibitions at the British Museum after the success of Tutankhamun appeared insatiable. Crowds flocked to this Turner show a few years later, featuring a fraction of what is held among the museum's department of more than two-and-a-half million prints and drawings.

EDWARD HOPPER

Tate Modern, 27 April to 5 September 2004

429, 909 visitors

In the final days of this 2004 exhibition, Tate Modern kept its doors open until 10pm every evening to accommodate the droves of Hopper fans keen to see his Nighthawks and Automat paintings.

CÉZANNE

Tate, 8 February to 28 April 1996

406,688 visitors

More than 5,000 fans saw this retrospective on its opening day. Previous notable Cézanne shows had focused on his early work; this one delivered the whole story. It came to London from the Grand Palais in Paris before moving to Philadelphia. That it stopped here is proof of Britain's strong and international gallery-going reputation. The show's curators, who ensured the London stopover - were from the French and American galleries.

MONET IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Royal Academy, 23 January to 18 April 1999

739, 324 visitors

Scheduling a Monet exhibition seems a surefire a way to gallery success. This show heralded an end to the Royal Academy's stuffy old ways by opening for a marathon 34-hour viewing over its final weekend and featuring a live band, breakfast bar and midnight debates. Nevertheless, it didn't come cheap. The £9 ticket price was then the highest in the UK.

ART DECO

Victoria & Albert Museum, 27 March to 20 July 2003

359,499 visitors

Other galleries have attracted larger numbers, but the V&A's stylish Deco show was a huge hit, bringing in over 120,000 more visitors than any of its other shows; proof of the popularity of the Art Deco movement. It included Clarice Cliff pottery, vintage furniture and Lalique glass.

POMPEII AD79

Royal Academy, 20 November 1976 to 27 February 1977

633, 841 visitors

They might not learn Latin, but the story of Pompeii is probably the only Roman Empire story today's schoolchildren know. It drew more than 600,000 eager fans. Ancient civilisations sell tickets - the RA's Aztecs show in 2002/03 pulled in almost half-a-million visitors.

Sophie Morris

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