"How’d you get so funky?" A 1976 King Tut MMA 18K Gold Exhibition Ring

"How’d you get so funky?" From November 1976 to April 1979, “Treasures of Tutankhamun” traveled to six American cities with the help of NEH grants. As millions of people lined up for hours to see the show, museums became the hottest tickets in town, helping usher in the era of the blockbuster museum exhibition.  Tutankhamun, more commonly known as King Tut, has played an outsized role in our cultural imagination ever since archaeologist Howard Carter and his patron, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, opened his tomb in November 1922. Throughout the fall and winter of 1974 to 1975, the State Department negotiated with the Egyptians. It was decided the exhibition would start in 1976 and serve as a gift of friendship from Egypt to the United States during the bicentennial year. The inclusion of a Tut show in the Nixon-Sadat agreement upended plans by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to organize its own Tut exhibition. J. Carter Brown, the gallery’s director, had already received