For example, when Hoving was meeting with officials of the Egyptian Museum in the late 1970s to select pieces for the Tutankhamun show, there was no electricity in the museum. None. Not a volt. Not an outlet. Not a wire. And yet the museum held most of the King Tutankhamun treasures discovered by Howard Carter and Lord Carvarvon.
Several million dollars to renovate the museum and install electricity had been given by the Met some twenty or thirty years earlier as part of a complicated purchase arrangement, but the museum's directors and the Supreme Council of Antiquities had not yet decided on a plan of renovation. After all, they'd only had twenty or thirty years. Why rush the decision?
Incidentally, to photograph the pieces for the Met's Tut catalog, the Met 'borrowed' a few hundred feet of electrical cable from the Giza pyramid lighting show, tapped directly into the electrical lines in the street outside the Egyptian Museum, ran the line through a broken window on the second floor of the museum, and set up a temporary photographic studio. The Met also ran a temporary line to the museum director's office so that he had a desk lamp during the period the Met was shooting photos for the Tut exhibit catalog.
Ummm. I meant Lord Carnarvon. The Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, George Herbert.