By Akram Medhat
Dr. Khaled El-Enany, Minister of Antiquities, left this morning for the French capital, Paris, to open the King Tutankhamun exhibition at its second stop after the end of its run in Los Angeles in the United States, as part of a tour of some of the young king's treasures to a number of countries around the world before they return to their permanent display at the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is scheduled to open in 2020.
The Minister of Antiquities will officially open the exhibition in Paris tomorrow, Thursday, March 21, under the title "Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Pharaoh". It will run until mid-September, and will open to the public on March 23.
The French capital celebrated the young king and his artifacts and welcomed the exhibition, which comes to Paris after an absence of 52 years, as the last Tutankhamun exhibition was held in 1967 and was visited by about 1.2 million people.
The main streets, squares, buildings and metro stations in Paris were decorated with huge banners depicting the face of King Tutankhamun and some of his artifacts.
News of the golden king and his exhibition also topped the front pages of French newspapers and magazines, most of which prepared illustrated press files on the King Tutankhamun exhibition, his tomb and his lineage, as the French consider the exhibition the most important cultural event in France in the coming days.
The exhibition comes as part of the celebrations marking the approaching centenary of the most important discovery of the 20th century, the tomb of King Tutankhamun, which was found in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter on the West Bank in Luxor.
The exhibition's organizers said more than 130,000 tickets have been sold so far, and the number of tickets sold by opening day alone is expected to reach 150,000.
It is worth noting that the exhibition includes 150 artifacts from the young king's collection, among them a number of gilded ushabti statues, wooden boxes, canopic jars, the gilded wooden ka statue and alabaster vessels.
