I paid $32 to see a royal liver box?

Dave Boyer

is a member of The Inquirer Editorial Board

The King Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute is dull, dark and disappointing. But at least the lines are long.

More than 600,000 people viewed "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" in the show's first six weeks in Philadelphia. Rarely have so many paid so much to see an itty, bitty liver casket.

That was my sucker moment. I stood there, beholding the box that once stored Tut's bile, and began to feel rather poorly myself. Thirty-two bucks per ticket, plus parking and numbingly long lines, for this? Oy, I thought. His liver.

Call me a low-brow, a whiner, a Philistine. No offense taken: The original Philistines thought Pharaoh Ramesses III was tedious, too. So he smote them.

Not feeling appreciative of 3,000-year-old artifacts is a bit awkward. I knew I should appreciate the boy king's possessions. After all, how often are you in the presence of a potty chair or sippy cup made 1,300 years before Jesus Christ? OK, so it wasn't technically a "potty chair," but a pint-sized throne. An ancient potty chair would have been more interesting.

Perhaps I was missing the point of the little chair. For all their pyramid-building skills, ancient Egyptians had not yet figured out how to build a child's chair that doubles as a toilet? Therefore, we are superior? Am I right?

Yawning in the face of antiquity caused me to blame myself at first, as in a teenage breakup. It's not you, Tut - it's me. You're special, Tut. Don't ever change. Well, they kind of took care of that when they pumped you full of resins and sealed you inside a stone mountain for eternity, but you know what I mean. I'm the one at fault.

Perhaps my ambivalence came from spending too much time on YouTube, watching a cat play a piano concerto. Sometime during this Internet age, I lost my ability to be amazed.

But the exhibit has flaws, too. First, there is no mummy, nor even the famous golden mummy's mask. Tut is elsewhere. This is just wrong. You do an exhibit on King Tut, the star of the show really ought to be there. Remember how disappointed Sixers fans were when the Cleveland Cavaliers came to town and LeBron James didn't play because he was hurt? Well, Tut isn't hurt. He's dead. He can play this town dead.

Maybe it's a ghoulish request. And I knew when I bought the tickets that the mummy was not included. But the omission is striking, especially after you shuffle through the Franklin Institute's cattle chutes for 45 minutes just to reach the start of the exhibit. After jostling the too-large crowds for hours on end, you need a mummy. Instead, you get a CAT scan of a mummy. (When you've been dead for 3,000 years, who is responsible for your co-pay?)

A Tut show without Tut is a bit like Hannibal Lecter's U-Store-It locker without the preserved head in the jar. It lacks that certain macabre something that will make you run home to tell the neighbors. I just can't work up as much enthusiasm for an unguent spoon.

Most of the old stuff on display didn't even belong to Tut. The gee-whiz factor diminishes somewhat when you realize that you are looking at a model boat that once belonged to Tut's second cousin, twice removed. Ditto the dog collar found in the tomb of a royal fan-bearer named Maiherpri. I paid $30 to see the accoutrements of the Tut family's dog walker?

The wearying long lines are inevitable results of each Tut venue needing to cough up $5 million to the Egyptian government. Still, I felt like a pawn in an elaborate scheme to boost the Franklin Institute's VIP memberships. VIPs, of course, get to bypass smugly those long lines.

The quicker to see that liver box.