King Tut’s chariot arrives in Times Square

The chariot from the tomb of Tutankhamen at the Discovery Center in Times Square.

As 18th-Dynasty pharaohs' chariots go, the one that arrived in Times Square last Friday night was not a Mercedes or a Bentley. There was no gold leaf or fine animal-fur interior or richly appointed cartouche-ing. It was more like a teenager's dragster stripped down for speed, just a lightweight frame of tamarisk, elm and birch, missing only its two-horsepower engine.
Late on Sunday night, in a subterranean exhibition space on West 44th Street, a group of gloved art handlers -- under the wary supervision of Sanaa Ahmed Ali, director of the Luxor Museum in Egypt -- opened a wooden crate, unpacked the left wheel and slowly slid it onto the axle where it had once turned. An hour later they did the same with the right wheel. Then everyone in the room fell silent for a moment, looking at the result, before breaking into applause.
Though there were much fancier ceremonial chariots among the six discovered, in 1922, in the tomb of King Tutankhamen (as his name is often spelled), this one -- unveiled on Tuesday as a late, crowd-luring addition to “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” the commercial exhibition of Tut treasures at the Discovery Times Square Exposition -- is considered uniquely amazing by scholars because it is the only one that shows signs of wear and tear. So it has long been thought that it was the chariot actually used by the boy king for battle or, more likely, for hunting.
And with recent forensic and DNA examinations showing that Tut suffered from a degenerative bone disease and could have died from complications of malarial infection after he broke his leg in a fall, the chariot has taken on new importance as the centrepiece of a theory that it might have been the instrument of his premature death, before the age of 20.
The plan to send the chariot to New York -- its first trip out of Egypt since its creation 3,300 years ago -- was initiated by Zahi Hawass, the flamboyant general secretary of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, who is now the star of his own reality show on the History channel, “Chasing Mummies,” and a wily promoter of both himself and his country's archaeological riches.
The show's tour, which began in Los Angeles in 2005 and ends in New York on January 2, after passing through six other cities, has raised more than $100 million to be used for the improvement of Egypt's museums and its archaeological sites.
Source: The New York Times