The Smithsonian Magazine have an article on the "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" exhibition which opens soon at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

An exhibition featuring the first CT scans of the boy king's mummy tells us more about Tutankhamun than ever before.

"The problem with Tutankhamun is that you have an embarrassment of riches of objects, but when you get down to the historical documents and what we actually know, there is very little," says Kathlyn Cooney, a Stanford University Egyptologist and one of the curators of the first Tutankhamun exhibition to visit the United States in more than a quarter-century...

[More]   Smithsonian Magazine, Sminthsonian Institute, District of Columbia, USA, June 2005.

Official exhibition website: Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

The return of King Tut pits a growing reliance on big-ticket glitter against museums' mission to enlighten.

The mummy of Tutankhamun lies in pieces in its tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

It was dismembered, beheaded and cut in half in 1925, when Westerners separated Tut's resin-stuck corpse from its solid-gold coffin, making a literal hack job of it.

Maybe it's poetic justice, then, that Tut's return is exposing growing philosophical clefts in the corpus of the American art museum...

[More]   Los Angeles Times, California, USA, May 22, 2005, via Cronaca.

A letter published in last week's Al-Ahram decrying the Tutankhamun CT scan and the 'tragic state of our antiquities'.

Sir -- I am sickened and appalled by the unending desecration of the mummies of our ancient ancestors by the current Egyptian Antiquities authorities 'Tutankhamun unmasked' (Al-Ahram Weekly, 12-18 May).   What is even worse is to learn that this desecration is performed for the unimportant purpose of achieving inconclusive results about the cosmetic appearance of a deceased Pharaoh, based on interpretive speculation by modern computer technicians...

[More]   Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 743, 19 - 25 May 2005.

A long article (published over five-pages in the Sunday Times Magazine supplement) that takes pot-shots at Zahi Hawass and drags up the Joann Fletcher Nefertiti affair again.

They call him the Pharaoh, the keeper of the pyramids.   He rules Egyptology with an iron fist and a censorious tongue.   Nobody crosses Zahi Hawass and gets away with it.   As the fabulous treasures of Tutankhamun begin a world tour, Richard Girling excavates the conspiracies, conflicts and fears that curse the world of archaeology.

... It is Hawass who holds the keys to the pyramids, the Valley of the Kings, the Sphinx, Abu Simbel, everything.   No Egyptologist gets in without his permission, and few will chance his anger...

... Hawass is a one-man conflict zone who could start a war in an empty sarcophagus...

[More]   The Sunday Times Magazine, UK, May 22, 2005.