CHRISTIANE DESROCHES-NOBLECOURT — Toutankhamon et son temps, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, 1967

The cover is a single, tight crop of a face: gold, blue-striped, unmistakable even worn — the funerary mask of Tutankhamun, photographed close enough to fill the whole board. Fine crazing runs across the laminated surface, and a small chip has come away at the top corner. The back is left blank, lightly foxed, with one faint vertical crease.

Published for the exhibition that ran at the Petit Palais from 17 February to 4 September 1967, catalogued and written entirely by Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre, and inaugurated in person by André Malraux, France’s Minister of Culture. It brought together 45 objects from the royal tomb, drew over 1.24 million visitors, and held the French attendance record for fifty years, until 2019.

None of that is the reason to look twice. Between 1961 and 1967, Egypt sent a version of this same exhibition through the United States, Canada and Japan before it reached Paris — specifically to raise money and international pressure for the UNESCO campaign then underway to save the temples of Abu Simbel from the rising water behind the new Aswan High Dam. Admission money from shows exactly like this one funded a rescue operation still in progress when this catalogue went to print; the relocation itself wasn’t declared complete until September 1968, over a year after the doors in Paris closed. Everyone who paid to get in that spring was, mechanically, helping fund a mountain being moved. Desroches-Noblecourt was one of the people making that happen — not only the exhibition’s curator, but a central figure in the Nubian rescue campaign the tickets were funding.

Bound into the book is the evidence, undramatized: a photograph captioned 4 janvier 1967. Venant du Caire par la Compagnie Air France, le masque d’or de Toutankhamon arrive à Orly — the actual mask, arriving as air cargo six weeks before the exhibition opened. Further in, the entry for a single chaouabti runs to full scholarly apparatus: measurements to the millimetre, materials, provenance given plainly as Tombeau de Toutankhamon, a citation straight back to Howard Carter’s own excavation report. A working catalogue, not a souvenir.

Abu Simbel wasn’t finished for another year. This book already was.

Softcover, illustrated colour covers · 20 × 23.5 cm · 205 pages · Black-and-white and colour illustrations throughout · Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, 1967

Condition: Good. Fine crazing across the laminated cover, a small chip at the top corner, light foxing and a faint vertical crease to the back board. Text and plates clean throughout.