There’s gold in Tut & Co.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the saying “Everything old is new again” than the mystique of the mummies of ancient Egypt. Generation after generation has swooned at the sight of the pharaohs’ treasures, which remain unsurpassed three millenniums later. The Egyptian cult of the dead has found immortality in the imaginations of Westerners who have transmuted its symbols into opera, movies, furniture, jewelry, teapots, towels and more.

And now a new round of mummy mania is about to be unleashed upon Southern California with two shows: “Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt ... Treasures from the British Museum,” which opened Sunday at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana; and the blockbuster “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” which kicks off a four-city U.S. tour with a five-month stay at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, beginning June 16.

The King Tut exhibition marks the first time in 26 years that the exquisite reliquary objects buried with the young pharaoh will be seen outside the Cairo Museum. The show opened in Basel, Switzerland, where it attracted 620,000 visitors. It’s now in Bonn, and by the time it completes stops in Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Philadelphia, it will have raised millions for preservation of Egypt’s antiquities. At LACMA, tickets range from $15 to $30.

But the public’s fascination with ancient Egypt’s cult of the dead extends long before and far beyond shows assisted by hype. Patrick Polk, a UCLA folklorist and lecturer in the Department of World Arts and Cultures, says Westerners are attracted by the ancient Egyptians’ embrace of a subject we consider taboo.

“We have a cultural abhorrence of dealing with the dead and seeing human remains,” Polk says. “We set off houses of death -- cemeteries -- as a dangerous space, so there’s a cultural disconnect. What you see in mummies and the Egyptian cult of the dead is this idea that life is as much about preparing for the afterlife as anything else.”

And perhaps doing it successfully. “Death looms large in everyone’s minds,” says Peter Lacovara, curator of Egyptian art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta. “If anyone came close to defeating death, it seemed to be the Egyptians.”

The highest artistic expression of ancient Egyptian culture was reserved for the afterlife. The idea was that the spirit of the properly mummified dead person would be reborn in the land of the divine, where he or she would need all the accessories of life on Earth -- clothing, furniture, pots and pans. People would take the finest objects to their tombs, where they would spend far more time than they had on Earth. So the funerary world left behind an idealized portrait of life under the pharaohs.

The Bowers’ Egyptology show offers 140 funerary objects -- six mummies as well as coffins, amulets, vases, jewelry and furniture from the British Museum, which has the most extensive collection of such material outside of Cairo. The show runs through April 2007.

The Tut show, with well more than 100 objects, will be twice as big as the one that swept the U.S. and Europe from 1976 to ‘79, with only 14 pieces making a return visit. About half of the new show was culled from other 18th Dynasty (1555 B.C. to 1305 B.C.) tombs, which housed the remains of pharaohs Amenhotep II and Thutmose IV as well as Tut’s great-grandparents Yuya and Tuyu.

Highlights will include Tutankhamun’s gold diadem -- the crown discovered encircling the mummy’s head, which he likely wore in life -- and a small, gold canopic coffinette inlaid with precious stones, which held one of his embalmed internal organs. One of the most spectacular pieces that came to L.A. in the ‘70s -- the golden mask found on Tut’s mummy -- will not be included because the Egyptian government has declared it a national treasure, prohibited from leaving the country.

“We have a formal picture of Egypt from the tombs, from the text, the architecture, the statuary and the beautiful reliefs, but that’s only one segment of society,” says one of the organizers of the Tut show, David Silverman, Eckley B. Coxe Jr. professor of Egyptology and curator in charge of the Egyptian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. “It shows the picture the ancient Egyptians wanted to survive for a long period of time because hieroglyphs actually meant ‘the gods’ words,’ so they were immortal. Anything you put in stone or put in your tomb was supposed to last forever. So the picture we get isn’t the way it was. It was the way they wanted to be remembered.”

The West’s fascination with Egyptian artifacts notwithstanding, artists from that period had a far different relationship with their public. “Most Egyptian art -- tomb paintings and tomb reliefs -- was never meant to see the light of day,” says Willeke Wendrich, associate professor of Egyptian archeology at UCLA. “So the concept of art is different: You don’t produce something to display it. You produce it because it has a function in ritual and a magical transition from life to afterlife.”

For all the majesty of Tut’s tomb, it was probably far surpassed by those of longer-lived kings whose riches were robbed within generations, Egyptologists say. Tut’s tomb mostly escaped detection for 3,000 years because housing for workers building Ramses VI’s nearby tomb was built on top of Tut’s, thus obscuring it.

The ancient Egyptians tried to protect their tombs by posting curses at the entrance, which much later found notoriety in such films as 1944’s “The Mummy’s Curse” with Lon Chaney Jr. Thieves were threatened with posthumous judgment in the council of the great god or, in the shorter term, having their necks wrung “like a goose.” Robbers who were caught paid with their lives.

Egypt was plundered after Caesar conquered the country in 47 BC. “They carted no end of obelisks to Rome proper,” says Michael Pantazzi, curator of European art at the National Gallery of Canada, who co-curated a 1994 “Egyptomania” show with the Musee du Louvre in Paris. “There have been in 2,000 years more obelisks in Rome than all of Egypt.”

The next wave of Egyptomania hit Europe after Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. His campaign produced a 21-volume encyclopedia titled Description de l’Egypte, which inspired a huge vogue for Egyptian architecture and design.

“Monuments came to light which were the equal to or greater than any human achievement people had seen,” says Thomas Michie, LACMA’s associate curator in the decorative arts department.

One of the best-known creations from the period was an elaborate dessert service in the shape of Egyptian temples with obelisks, statues, sphinxes and rams, created by the Sevres Porcelain Factory about 1810 and still in production. Empire furniture from the early 19th century featured sphinx imagery and lion-legged chairs.

On a less rarefied note, Europeans ground up mummies and made medicine from them. Artists in Victorian England also ground them up to make paint in “mummy brown.” For some members of the upper crust, it was fashionable to throw parties where the chief entertainment lay in unwrapping a mummy, which could be obtained on the antiquities market.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 inspired jewelry and clothing with Egyptian motifs as well as the opening of a new opera house in Cairo, which led to the commission of the great Verdi opera “Aida.”

Even before the archeologist Howard Carter and his team discovered Tut’s tomb in 1922, ancient Egypt had seeped into American popular culture. Theda Bara starred in the title role of 1917’s “Cleopatra,” but her portrayal of the Egyptian queen as a vamp said more about the evolution of women in this country than it did about Egyptian history.

“Each wave of this puts its own particular stamp on it,” Lacovara says. “We’re seeing ourselves reflected in the mirror of ancient Egypt.”

Carter’s discovery opened the floodgates, coming as it did at the beginning of the age of mass media. Queen Nefertiti became an icon of female beauty and began appearing in ads hawking cosmetics and soap. Popular songs such as “The Maid and the Mummy” and “Old King Tut Was a Wise, Old Mutt” were played in honky-tonks. The Art Deco movement, launched in a 1925 Paris exhibition, borrowed the blocky, symmetrical, flattened abstract forms of Egyptian design, which began showing up in the apparel of couturier Paul Poiret and the jewelry of Cartier. Egyptian revival architecture found its way into the design of prisons, banks and movie theaters, notably including the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, built the year of Carter’s discovery by developer Charles E. Toberman and impresario Sid Grauman.

By the middle of the last century, movies dealing with ancient Egypt took greater pains to be historically accurate than contemporary films, Lacovara says. Egyptologists were hired to consult on Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 remake of “The Ten Commandments.” “You could read the hieroglyphics on the sets,” he says.

But nothing approached the impact of the ‘70s Tut tour, which drew 8 million people and raised $12 million in sales of reproductions by art institutions. In awe of the sheer numbers associated with the exhibition, Newsweek reported on the phenomenon in 1979: “What went on behind those 16 million eyes as they gazed into the eyes of the boy-pharaoh’s death mask and at the exquisite objects that had adorned his burial chamber? Eternally insouciant, the New Yorker conducted a mock interview with [Tutankhamun,] whose responses went a long way toward explaining the ‘Tut glut.’ Asked to describe the theme of the show, Tutankhamun replied with royal candor: ‘Yes, it’s about gold, man. Heavy metal.’ ”

There certainly was gold in the resurrection of Tut’s image by performers such as Steve Martin, who danced around the “Saturday Night Live” set in a mock Egyptian tunic singing his “King Tut” song, declaring that the royal was born in Arizona where he lived in a “condo made of stone-a.” Michael Jackson and director John Singleton used ancient Egypt as the mystical setting to suggest the pop star had magical powers in his 1992 video “Remember the Time.”

Pyramids inspired by Egypt continue to pop up on the Western landscape, from I.M. Pei’s glass addition to the Louvre completed in 1990 to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, which opened three years later. The cultural ripples are a testimony to the enduring power of the Egyptian cult of the dead.

“Were they able to live forever? No,” says Silverman. “But in theory or symbolically, how many other individuals do we know rather intimately who lived 3,300 years ago? In a certain way, they actually did accomplish their goals.”