Elizabethtown: Born in Arizona/Moved to Babylonia

The Oregon of Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI -- a frankly inferior name to Syracuse's Museum of Science and Technology, or MOST, which my father named) has a traveling King Tut exhibit. We had the opportunity to preview the exhibit for cheap because Elizabeth is in the Talented & Gifted program at school. So, for two hours we had free access to the museum -- and access to the King Tut exhibit was only five bucks. Great deal!

Elizabeth and Suzanne had carefully laid out plans: one hour for the Tut, one hour for the other, more fun rooms where you can do things like be in a simulated earthquake, or make a stop-motion animation movie, or hold a walking stick insect.

So we stood in line for thirty minutes to get tickets to Tut. Then we stood in an antechamber (if you will) watching a video (that played three times in a loop) and waiting to get access to the Tut exhibit. Then we were funneled into a theater where we watched an eight minute video about Howard Carter (the guy who led the expedition that found the tomb). The movie was interesting! But it was a movie.

After that, we moved through a series of tableaux that recreated Carter's discovery of the tomb of King Tut. It was pretty cool! Then we went upstairs to where all the artifacts were laid out for closer inspection. Also interesting and beautiful -- but 100% of what we looked at were reproductions. Even the mummy! It was a 3D printed model of the real King Tut mummy, based on a CAT scan or MRI or something. So... the whole experience was akin to going to a fake Louvre, and seeing a fake Mona Lisa and a fake David (which is not at the Louvre, but you get the idea).

The kids and I had a great time, until we realized we'd run out of time. As we were leaving the museum, we squeezed a few minutes of fun out of the animation studio, and had the close encounter with the walking stick bug, but both girls left a little crestfallen that their night at the museum hadn't amounted to more than looking at reproductions of Egyptian treasures.

This is what Howard Carter saw upon first entering the tomb. Although the front door was sealed, it appeared that tomb robbers had entered through a back way, probably shortly after the funeral. Which would explain the jumble of stuff. And who knows what went missing!

This shows the removal of the coffin from the sarcophagus, which was inside another sarcophagus, which was inside another sarcophagus, which was inside three layers of shrines -- the shrines were increasingly small gilded boxes nested inside each other like matryoshka dolls.

It was a small space. Getting the stuff from the burial chamber out was an enormous task that took over 80 days.

The Treasury.

Detail on one of the shrines. Beautiful, and nuts.

This is one of the shrines. They built three of these, one inside the other. And inside the smallest one was....

...the Sarcophagus. Inside this was another sarcophagus, and then a coffin. And then a mummy wearing a mask. These guys were nothing if not thorough.