Most of the objects were excavated in the Valley of the Kings, two desert canyons on the west bank of the Nile, 416 miles south of Cairo. “Once the president decided to put Egypt’s collections back on the museum circuit, we obtained the green light for the project,” says Wenzel Jacob, director of the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle museum in Bonn, Germany, where the exhibition was on display before moving to Los Angeles. In the end, Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, intervened. Negotiations for the exhibition dragged on for three years while the Egyptian Parliament and many archaeologists resisted lifting a travel ban imposed in 1982 after a gilt goddess from Tut’s tomb was broken while on tour in Germany.

On loan from the Egyptian National Museum in Cairo, this astonishingly well-preserved assemblage includes jewelry, furniture and exquisitely carved and painted cosmetics vessels. On display are 50 stunning funerary objects from the pharaoh’s tomb and 70 pieces from other ancient tombs and temples, dating from 1550 to 1305 B.C. (The show opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on June 16 and travels to the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.) “The problem with Tutankhamun is that you have an embarrassment of riches of objects, but when you get down to the historical documents and what we actually know, there is very little,” says Kathlyn Cooney, a Stanford University Egyptologist and one of the curators of the first Tutankhamun exhibition to visit the United States in more than a quarter-century. Despite recent findings indicating that Tut, as he has come to be known, was probably not murdered, the life and death of the celebrated boy-king remain a tantalizing mystery. Delicately engraved on a gilt shrine, it’s a scene (above) of touching intimacy, a window into the lives of the ancient Egyptian monarchs who reigned more than 3,300 years ago. Seated on a cushion at the Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s feet, Ankhesenamun hands her young husband an arrow to shoot at ducks in a papyrus thicket.

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