AFTER 30 YEARS, KING TUT IS BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO at the M.H. de Young in Golden Gate Park, and this time he’s brought a few relatives. The exhibit runs through March 28, 2010.
The beefed up revival of the 1970s traveling museum blockbuster has added 80 gilded, gold, alabaster and semi-precious stone artifacts from other Egyptian pharaohs, their wives and offspring, to the original 50 pieces from the tomb of Egyptian boy King Tutankhamun.
With the world zipping by on cell phones, Blackberries and the Internet, King Tut redux is a mind-opening, 
three-dimensional journey to around 1300 B.C., during a rocky era of pharaoh rule that swung between tyrannical to peace loving.
Whatever the politics, the ancient Egyptians were elegant artisans and forward-looking architects. In particular, Miss Jo likes to see how Art Deco lines and adornments borrowed heavily from early Egyptian art.
Disappointingly, the exhibit sheds little new light on King Tut since his last visit to San Francisco, like questions surrounding why he ascended the thrown at nine and what he died from about 10 years later.
Breaking new ground are cat scans of the pharaoh’s mummified remains—encased in three coffins with the last made of gold—- that reveal broken ribs and perhaps signs of scoliosis on a petite frame.
Speculation about his death swings between whether the king was crushed in a chariot accident or maybe suffered from a congenital concave chest.
Theories about the little king’s ancestry are also unproven, such as whether his parents were the power-hungry and narcissistic Queen Nefertiti and King Akhenaten, and whether Tut married a sister. Perhaps luckily, the king, credited with temporarily restoring peace to the kingdom, died without an heir.Recent DNA tests in Egypt are also expected to shed light on his peeps.
The exhibit is worth a look-see while in San Francisco, its last stop in the U.S. It’s also a good excuse to drop by the de Young, pictured above peaking above the treeline. Openned in 2005, the copper-sheathed Herzog & de Meuron building is starting to turn the color of the park’s Eucalyptus tree trunks, as the architects envisioned. The contemporary art museum also has an observatory tower with an enchanting 360-degree view of San Francisco.