Friday, June 4, 2021

What would a Blockbuster Exhibition of Tutankhamun's gold be worth today?

“What are King Tut’s golden treasures worth today?” a Today Show reporter asked. “Back in 2004, the conservative Swiss at their Museum of Ancient Art gave King Tut’s treasure a replacement value of three-quarters of a billion dollars. Yet the solid gold inner coffin alone weighed almost two hundred and fifty pounds. The golden death mask, in twenty-two carat gold, weighs over twenty-two pounds. The US has indemnified the exhibition contents for six hundred and fifty million dollars, the upper limit. But that’s laughably small when a single Da Vinci painting fetched four hundred and fifty million at a recent auction in New York, purchased by a Middle Eastern buyer. And then there’s the sublime artistry of the works. Back in 1923 they put a combined value of fifteen million on the contents of the tomb, a massive amount at the time. A mathematician at Johns Hopkins University recently calculated that if this amount had been invested at a secure six percent rate of return when the king died three thousand, four hundred years ago it would amount to a number we can’t actually express today and would look like this...” They flashed up a graphic. Value today: $14,288, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000. "In other words, all the wealth in the world. And that about sums it up. King Tut’s golden treasures are worth the world. Irreplaceable. Yet now, sensationally, they’re misplaced... so where are they right now?” (Excerpt) NEW Egypt adventure, crime, mystery fiction by Roy Lester Pond 'THE BLOCKBUSTER PLOT' appears in my Egypt crime collection of fiction http://amzn.to/oWVTPV

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