Spare a thought for poor, forgotten Theodore Davis. In the early 1900s, the American archaeologist embarked on extensive excavation works in the famous Valley of the Kings. He was searching for the holy grail of Egyptology: an intact pharaoh’s tomb. But over 12 long years in the desert, Davis failed to make the discovery that could make his name. Bitter and disappointed, he declared the valley “exhausted” and sold his excavation licence to a British aristocrat, Lord Carnarvon.

Only two metres away from where Davis had concluded his last excavation lay the tomb of Tutankhamun, Egypt’s ‘boy king’, buried 3,000 years ago with rooms full of treasure to bring with him to the afterlife.
Lord Carnarvon bought Davis’s licence at the insistence of his slightly mad chief archaeologist, Howard Carter. Carter was obsessed with finding the tomb of Tutankhamun, and refused to accept the universally-held view that the tomb was long gone, emptied by looters millennia ago. On November 4, 1922, Carter made the crucial discovery.
Tutankhamun: His Tomb and Treasures, the gargantuan exhibition currently on show at the RDS, takes Carter’s moment of discovery as the starting point for what promoters MCD are billing as “a captivating journey through time.”
Over 1,000 replica artefacts have been created in painstaking detail, at a cost of €4 million, and arranged in rooms, so that the visitor can revisit just what Carter and Carnarvon would have seen when they first climbed down into the tomb. The originals are under lock and key in a Cairo museum; two statues of Tutankhamun disappeared during the recent riots, but the Egyption authorities insist that the museum has now been secured.
The RDS show’s executive producer, Christoph Scholz, enthuses that this is a new type of event, “an experience rather than an exhibition”; he doesn’t just want to teach you about ancient Egypt, he wants you to feel the excitement of Carter’s discovery as if you were there.
There’s a distinct whiff of Indiana Jones-type pluckiness in the version of Howard Carter we meet in the short film that introduces to the exhibition. However, although the exhibits themselves are more like a movie set than a museum, His Tomb And Treasures is underpinned by serious scholarship. The audio guide is hugely interesting on the different Gods, dynasties and customs referenced in hieroglyph on Tutankhamun’s many death gifts.
From the ‘rooms’, the visitor is lead into a large display area, with key replicas – the thrones, coffins and, of course, the iconic mask – arranged as in a traditional gallery. Visitors are invited to project their own imagining of what it would have been like to uncover the tomb for the first time and gaze on the artefacts as if through Carter’s eyes. For scholars of ancient Egypt, leaps of imagination are a daily necessity. Egyptologist Claire Ollett points out that the thousands of years separating us from the ancient Egyptians means that there many questions that can never be answered.
Among the many things we will never know about Tutankhamun is why he died at only 19, but Ollett favours the most recent theory that the young king contracted some sort of infection after breaking his leg.
Carnarvon, of course, famously died within weeks of the tomb being opened, after a mosquito bite he accidentally cut while shaving became infected. The “curse of the pharaoh’s tomb” had been awoken! Carter passed away 10 years after his patron, after a not very paranormal-sounding battle with cancer. He died an obscure figure, never receiving public recognition in his own lifetime as a great archaeologist.
Ollet reckons that Carter would have approved of an exhibition like His Tomb And Treasures that brings the story of Tutankhamun to the general public, rather than aiming at the educated elite.
“Carter really cared about Tutankhamun – it was his thing. I think he’d be really chuffed that people were still interested all these years later,” says Ollett. “We think you’ve got your body and soul but the Egyptians thought there were lots of different aspects to a person, all of which were needed to survive and have an afterlife. One of them was the name, so if the name was spoken after death you could live on. So the fact that people are speaking Tutankhamun’s name would mean the ‘boy king’ lives. That’s something Carter would have great respect for.”

Tutankhamun: His Tomb And Treasures runs at the RDS, Dublin from February 17. www.ticketmaster.ie.