Museum directors around the world know that there are two surefire crowd-pleasers guaranteed to break box office records: dinosaurs and mummies.
Consequently, when the Australian Museum emerged from Covid-19, it turned to cretaceous creatures to entice families out of lockdown. Over its brief four-month season in 2021, Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family sold more than 100,000 tickets.
This next blockbuster at Australia’s oldest museum, Ramses & the Gold of the Pharaohs, has already pre-sold more than 100,000 tickets, before the opening this weekend.
The travelling exhibition is a major coup for the Australian Museum. More than 180 artefacts including 3,000 year-old sarcophagi, imposing colossuses, exquisite funerary finery, mummified mongooses and crocodiles and a trove of gold and gemstone treasures have been transported from Egypt to Sydney, via Paris.
The jewel in the diadem is the 1.85 metre high 19th-dynasty royal coffin of Ramses the Great, uncovered in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings in 1881 and never displayed publicly outside Egypt until this year.
Although the collected objects are priceless and, needless to say, irreplaceable, the exhibition comes with a $2.4bn insurance policy, financed by the global immersive technology company NEON.
Troy Collins, the executive vice-president of NEON’s subsidiary World Heritage Exhibitions, was on hand at the Australian Museum’s media launch on Thursday. He was polite but tight-lipped about the budget for a blockbuster of such magnitude but, when nudged, put the ongoing costs of developing, marketing, maintaining and travelling Ramses in the realm of hundreds of thousands of US dollars on top of the eye-watering insurance bill.
“It takes a great deal of money, as you can imagine, to mount an exhibition like this,” Collins said.
“We’re the producer, we are the designers … we’re also the operators, so we’re responsible for moving [the exhibition], installing it, maintaining it and protecting the objects at all time.”
World Heritage Exhibitions is also responsible for keeping the political elite in Cairo happy. The latter task includes a substantial and undisclosed lending fee paid to Egypt’s government, the bulk of which, Collins says, is channelled into conservation of existing archaeological sites and funding new digs.
The conduit in it all is Egypt’s own self-styled Indiana Jones, Dr Zahi Hawass, the former minister of state for antiquities under the Hosni Mubarak autocracy. Hawass was subsequently removed from his position by the incoming Islamist government after the Arab spring uprising of 2011.
Equal parts scientist and showman, Hawass is undisputedly the world’s most famous Egyptologist, with a slew of television documentaries and books to his credit including the current Netflix hit Unknown: The Lost Pyramid.
“God gave me this charisma, he did not give it to anyone else,” Hawass told the Smithsonian Magazine in 2013, when journalist Joshua Hammer repeated his rivals’ claims that his fame is attributable more to self-promotion and political connections than scientific clout. “Who is the star now? Tell me. Do you know the name of any Egyptian antiquitist?”
Hawass is the official curator of the Ramses exhibition. Speaking from Cairo, he told Guardian Australia he plans to come to Sydney in April to deliver a lecture on stolen Egyptian antiquities, part of his work compelling major collecting institutions around the world to return culturally significant Egyptian artefacts, including the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, the Nefertiti bust in Berlin’s Neues Museum and the Dendera zodiac in the Louvre.
“My name is well known all over the world,” he said. “They’re looking at the Opera House because they need a big venue for my lecture.”
By next April, Hawass expects his status as international celebrity to be augmented, after an imminent discovery. “In four months from now I will be able to announce to the world the discovery of the mummy of Queen Nefertiti,” he said. Reminded that he told Spanish newspaper the Independent more than a year ago that he would be announcing the Nefertiti discovery “in a month or two”, he reiterated: “I’m sure, 100%, in four months from now.”
Hawass himself has been accused by some preservation purists and scholars of having “Disneyfied” Egypt’s cultural heritage and Ramses & the Gold of the Pharaohs could face similar criticisms. Alongside antiquities, the exhibition also includes a CGI recreation of the 1275BC Battle of Kadesh, which pitted Ramses against the Hittites, and a virtual reality tour through the world heritage-listed Abu Simbel temple – guided by the pharaoh’s curvaceous and beguilingly robed first wife Queen Nefertari, which Australian Museum director Kim McKay concedes may not be entirely historically accurate.
Collins, who also led the Battleship New Jersey Museumand Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute before joining the NEON stable, is sensitive to the criticism.
“Yes the VR has some entertainment value to it but, when you go in the exhibition, it is entirely historically accurate,” he says. “It is not dumbed down. If you want to take the time to read every graphic and every label and listen to every stop on the audio tour, you will get every bit of a museum experience as you would anywhere else.
“I myself spent 14 years on the museum side. So I’m very, very cognisant of what that mission is. And we do not deviate.”
Ramses & the Gold of the Pharaohs is showing at Sydney’s Australian Museum from 18 November 2023 to 19 May 2024
