Giza via Glastonbury: first verdict on Tutankhamun

The Herald Scotland

23-07-2025

If you've been out and about in Glasgow, you'll have noticed the adverts, on buses, trains, billboards. 'Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition. Bringing Ancient Egypt to Life Like Never Before. Treasure Rooms. Interactive Digital Metaverse. VR Experience. Hologram. 360° Immersive Experience.' Sounds like quite a show. Does it deliver?
They certainly know how to build your expectations. At the entrance to the venue in the SEC, the lighting's low, there's aah-ooh Temple of Doom music, and they deliberately tease you by holding back on the metaverse and VR bits, which is what most people have come for to be honest. The producers of the exhibition say it's designed for history fans, lovers of tech and the hardest of all audiences to please – children – so I'm wondering how they're going to do it, especially in the age when everyone's fingers are twitching to get back to their phones ASAP.
At first, it's all surprisingly traditional: items in glass cases with explanatory notices, but what items. There's a page from the diary of Howard Carter, the man who discovered Tutankhamun, which captures the moment he first found evidence of the tomb's existence. Saturday, November 4, 1922. Five words scrawled, quickly, excitedly, over the page and nothing else. 'First steps of tomb found.' It's an extraordinary, and thrilling, object to look at.
There are thrills - then-meets-now thrills - in the other objects too, which are a mix of genuine and facsimile. I'm fascinated by the sistrum, an intricate musical instrument from around 700BC, which is topped by a carving of the cat god Bastet; what did it sound like, hundreds of them being played at ceremonies? Other objects make you feel either very close or very distant from the time of Tut. There's a vase that looks like something you'd get in a gift shop today, but there's also a weird double-pyramid-shaped stone that makes you feel the distance of the 5,000 years since it was made. What was it for? Not even the experts know.
A recreation of the tomb (Image: Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition)
Then we're into the first of the immersive bits of the exhibition and suddenly we're in a vast 1,200 square-metre hall playing visions of ancient Egypt on the walls and the floor. At one point it feels like we're hitching a ride on a drone as it dives through a valley, then we're inside a temple with the wall paintings coming to life, then suddenly it's all thumping beats and strobing lights: Ancient Egypt by the Chemical Brothers, Giza via Glastonbury. We also stop off in the delta at one point and its inhabitants scurry up the walls and under our feet. Sufferers of entomophobia may wish to look away.
The next immersive gallery is where it gets proper Matrix. You're led to a chair that turns 360°, you put on headphones and VR goggles and once you adjust to the new virtual world, you emerge from a sarcophagus – this is pretty macabre stuff at times – and scramble through the tomb to the world outside, and soar over the pyramids. It's cool, you'll like it.
The second VR chamber is even more intense. This time you walk rather than sit and everyone else in the room is represented by virtual Howard Carters; you can also see your own hands in computerised form as you point at things. I'm probably not doing a good job of describing this because it's a new experience and disconcerting but definitely worth trying; put on the goggles and see for yourself.
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The trick of the show as a whole is that, with videos that do big and objects that do tiny, it does well in living up to the promise of appealing to the different audiences: history fans, tech lovers, and children. In the video room, excited kids chase the animations across the floor and luckily the room's big enough for that not to be annoying. Perhaps the informative and the immersive could have been integrated more, with more facts to go with the epic bits, but just as I'm watching scarab beetles scurry under my chair, we hear the voice of Howard Carter echoing forwards from the 20s – 'we realised,' he says, 'that we were in the presence of the dead king'. It's another of the thrilling moments.
As for the most interesting moment, for me anyway, and I'm not sure what it says about me, it's the bit in the hologram room where you find out exactly what mummification involves. The commentary explains how all the organs except the heart were removed from the body and how the brain was removed through the nose using a long hook. It's that dark little fact that will probably stay with me the longest.
By the time I've reached the shop at the end – good shop by the way: pencils, T-shirts, bookmarks, proper old-school gift shop – I'm thinking this is probably how you need to do big exhibitions now; objects behind glass on their own won't cut it anymore, and the epic bits are epic. Maybe we could have had more about ordinary Egyptians (who suffered for all this gold?) but The Immersive Exhibition – using tricks of the trade from Indiana Jones and Glastonbury and Minecraft – achieves its aim of pleasing lovers of history and lovers of tech and lovers of both. And if you haven't tried VR before, this is a fun place to start.
Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition is at the SEC until October 26th.