A Day With King Tut

Since we’ve decided not to do the family vacation thing this year, we’re going to pack as many trips as we can into the weekends.  Recently, we went to the Atlanta Civic Center to see the King Tut Exhibit.    The National Geographic exhibit has 130 objects from King Tutankhamun’s tomb as well as relics from the tombs of other pharaohs’, many of which have never been within the United States before. 

My favorite pieces were the jewelry, but the statuary was incredible as well.  Unfortunately, my somewhat ghoulish children were extremely disapointed that there were no mummies, since many of the objects aren’t allowed to leave Egypt, and had to settle for the canopic jars and a cat sarcophagus.  Not only were the relics interesting to look at, I feel my children learned a great deal about  King Tut’s history.  Narrated by Harrison Ford, the presentation on Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery, the death and burial process, and the Egyptian religion were enlightening and appropriate for a variety of ages. 

The exhibition will be (or already is) in Dallas, San Francisco, Indianapolis, and Toronto.  If you have the time and inclination, I highly recommend it. I’m just so happy my children now know something about Egypt that isn’t related to Scooby Doo.  Now I just have to figure out how to correct all the other history they’ve learned from Scooby Doo, mainly the stuff about the gladiator zombie from Pompeii.

-Heather Brooks