Robinett/Jones Family Diary: King Tut and the Field Museum

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

King Tut and the Field Museum

After taking a shower I feel much more human. I will go upstairs and take a big whopping dose of naprosyn and go to bed in a few minutes. But first, a brief talk about the King Tut Exhibit at the Field Museum.

We had bought our tickets as soon as we knew the dates we would be in Chicago. We knew it would be very crowded, so we decided to go early on a weekday morning, in hopes of missing the possibly unbearably heavy crowds on weekends.

That worked pretty well. We had chosen a time that coincided with the time the museum opened, so we were able to walk right in and go straight to the exhibit, while there was a huge line of people there waiting to purchase their tickets.

I would really recommend buying tickets in advance if possible!

The exhibit did a very good job of placing Tut as an historical person - telling of the events leading up to his becoming King of one of the world's great super powers of his time, and how the last king before him (possibly his father) had made some huge changes in the state religion (to a monotheism), and how Tut tried to change things back to what they had once been (polytheism). They also explained the religious and cultural significance of the items placed in his tomb very well. At the end they showed some of the medical scans done on his mummy and offered possible explanations of how such a young and healthy man came to suddenly die (quite possibly an infection from a recently broken leg which might have gone septic).

Now, the dry climate of Egypt lends itself to preserving things that would have rotted in thirty years or less in my part of the world, much less the three thousand or so years since the death of King Tut. It was amazing seeing some of these things, knowing how old they are. There was a chair with its original woven seat. There were the sculpted wooden heads of a cow and a calf with the original paint still on them.

What was even more amazing is how beautiful many of the items were, and how well crafted they were. We might be hard pressed today to find craftsman/artisans with work of that high a quality. Most people just do not have the time to learn skills up to that level.

It was a morning well spent, and after the exhibit, we made sure to visit Sue the dinosaur, and some of the bird and animal halls. Dan wanted to see the man eating lions that inspired the film The Ghost and the Darkness, so we made sure to visit them.