What if Tutankhamun had his own Instagram account?

Inside a pristine glass box at the new Grand Egyptian Museum, King Tutankhamun’s golden mask sits motionless as a sea of people and camera flashes are aimed in his direction, almost as if the young king is still alive somewhere behind that mask. His presence feels so vivid and real that you half-expect him to turn, flinch, or even smile back at you. 

But instead, he simply remains still, like a magnet drawing everyone toward him. He attracts all gazes, yet he never chases a single gaze. He pulls everyone to follow him, yet he never follows anyone back.

Just as we scroll through an Instagram page and scrutinize its neat little boxes, from moments frozen in place to people captured inside a still frame, King Tutankhamun exists in his own kind of image box. He sits, powerful and untouched, behind a glass box that has held him in a single moment. 

And the same way we tap ‘follow’ to keep looking at those frozen snapshots, visiting the Grand Egyptian Museum feels like pressing ‘follow’ on Tutankhamun himself, as though he had an Instagram account of his own, stepping closer to his glass box to witness his eternal, unchanging glory.

But, the difference is that, instead of following random influencers and hollow content that adds little to our reality, we are following a historical figure whose legacy is rich in knowledge, art, and science; a legacy that still has the power to teach us not only about the world around us, but also about what it means to be human in today’s world.

And in doing so, perhaps we will learn to see the world again as ancient civilizations once did, guided only by the open sky above and the ground beneath their feet, in a time when nature spoke louder than any machine.