Paul Collins, curator for the Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, says this ‘Egyptomania’ was fed “by a perfect storm of technology. The dig revealed that the world was enchanted by the treasures – extraordinary and ordinary. His approach was meticulous and dramatic, photographing objects from multiple angles with specialist lighting and staging that were being developed in the new film industry in Hollywood at the time. Harry Burton, a British-born art photographer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was brought in to photograph the excavations. Cat Warsi, assistant archivist at the Griffith Institute in Oxford, argues the financial support and continued media interest was vital “because this was a costly excavation that in the end took almost 10 years”. At the time, this sort of arrangement was extremely unusual. To raise money to pay for the complex process of excavation, preservation and cataloguing the tomb’s riches, Lord Carnarvon signed an exclusive deal with The Times newspaper giving it sole rights to supply the world’s press with news and photographs. Egypt had recently undergone a political transformation, and the new government kept a tight control on the artefacts. In 1922, Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who found the tomb, was caught in the middle of a political storm. The mysterious ancient figure challenging China’s historyīut as I explore in a new Radio 4 programme, The Cult of King Tut, the power of King Tutankhamun lay as much in the extraordinary context of the 1920s as it did in the contents of the tomb. How ancient Egypt shaped our idea of beauty Where does the legend of the mummy come from? As the largest collection of Tutankhamun’s treasures to travel outside of Egypt goes on display at the Saatchi Gallery in London (after drawing record-breaking numbers in LA and Paris), the find clearly still has a global appeal in the 21st Century. For today’s archaeologists, the explanation for the cult of King Tut lies in the exceptional richness of the discovery, especially as many of the tombs were robbed of their mortuary goods and in the mystique surrounding the premature deaths of the boy king and Lord Carnarvon, who funded the dig.

When King Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened in November 1922, the world fell under his spell.

Treasures of Pharaoh Tut