Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The King Tut exhibit, which has not been to San Francisco in about 30 years, is in town and Daisy wanted to go see it. So, last Friday night, we dashed off for a little culture.

My coworker, Ashton, has a rule about culture. His rule is that anything made before 1983 is completely uninteresting to him. Don't talk to him about Led Zeppelin, or M*A*S*H, or The Godfather.

I've realized that I probably have a similar bias. I have a hard time getting excited about anything before around 1900. So, King Tut just barely misses the mark by about 3000 years. Actually, King Tut wasn't even there. Apparently he couldn't be bothered to come to San Francisco this time, so we just looked at a bunch of his stuff.

Most of the artifacts at the exhibit concerned the religious beliefs of King Tut and his peeps. We saw numerous carvings and sculptures that were supposed to aide King Tut during his afterlife. Note, however, that I've never even been able to pay attention to what's important in my own (ex) religion, so staggering through display after display of the wooden boats that were supposed to guide King Tut in the afterlife, and the "shabti" figurines that were supposed to do all his afterlife chores, just really wasn't my idea of a fun or interesting Friday night.

It's not like the ancient Egyptians even had a compelling vision for their afterlife. At least with Christianity you have the stark dichotomy of the Hell vs Heaven destinations. Hell is all fiery and brimstoney while Heaven offers blissful joy. That's drama! With Islam you get the potential comedy of awkward sex with 72 inexperienced partners. In King Tut's day, however, they were consumed with trying to get out of afterlife laundry, dishes, and cleaning the pyramid gutters. That's just weird.

All that being said, if the museum had let me play with the boats, or scare little kids with his golden mask, THAT might have been fun, but if all I can do is look at old crap in a glass case, well that's about as interactive as being a fan of King Tut on Facebook. Scratch that. At least on Facebook I could have written on his wall.

Daisy dug it though.

4 comments:

tinyhands said...

I saw the same exhibit in Philadelphia a few years ago. Had I known you were planning to go, I would have tried to talk you out of it. I thought it was boring too.

Sue said...

I heard it was pricey - not worth it. Glad I didn't go.

nrd2 said...

did they have any canopic jars? i've been intrigued by those since i was daisy's age.

Mike said...

Tiny, I wasn't the one lobbying to go.

Sue, it WAS pricey. For two adults and one kid, with the audio tour, it was over $100.

Nrd2, yeah, I believe they did. That was one of the parts where Daisy said, "Gross!"