"Cleopatra' at the Franklin Institute

Of all the ancient civilizations, Egypt is the most glamorous. The Great Pyramids are the only wonders of the ancient world still standing. Carter's thrilling 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen's partially looted tomb yielded breathtaking golden artifacts.

Plus, of course, there's Cleopatra, who ensorcelled Julius Caesar and Marc Antony with a potent mixture of beauty and brains, thus inspiring artists (not least among them Shakespeare and Shaw) ever since.

So it's no trick to find a mass audience eager to view any museum show with an Egyptian connection. The trick is finding the objects to exhibit.

Two different Tut shows (one of them at the Franklin Institute in 2007) are currently touring. Tut's treasures, though, are an anomaly. The most dramatic mementos of Egyptian culture— large-scale tombs and monuments— survived because of their heft. But such objects obviously don't lend themselves particularly well to touring shows. So what's a museum director looking for a turnstile-whirling blockbuster to do?

Her burial spot

"Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt" focuses on the results of two different archaeological projects in sites associated with Cleopatra. One of these, Taposiris Magna, is the spot where at least one archaeologist believes Cleopatra was buried.

The other is in the bay at Alexandria, site of two towns associated with Cleopatra: Canopus (both a resort and a pilgrimage destination) and Heracleion (where the Ptolemaic rulers were crowned). There archaeologists have found not only a variety of ritual and domestic tchotchkes but several good-sized sculptures and a dramatic pair of 16-foot figures that once guarded the entry of a temple to Amun.

The loathsome audio

The show was ingeniously assembled with multimedia material designed to turn this relatively small number of objects into a spectacle. One element, of course, is the inevitable audio narration, a medium I loathe.

In this case, the narration was provided by a sultry female voice with a vaguely Middle Eastern accent who spoke in the persona of Cleopatra. She explained her heritage and background in meticulous detail. Alas, my philoso-visceral objection to audio tours— and my impatience with the careful explication of material with which I wasn't unfamiliar— led me to ditch the audio after the first three stations.

Luckily, flat-screen monitors scattered around the exhibit space provide additional information. Some of it is cheesy (like an animation of the Osiris/Isis myth in which the characters looked like cartoon superheroes), but much of it is genuinely helpful. Videos describe the archaeological process, and PowerPoint presentations highlight and explain visual elements of objects in ways that allow you to examine the pieces directly and see them as scholars do.

What did she look like?

In addition to the recently discovered pieces, the exhibit includes some material more directly connected to Cleopatra. For instance, you can see a document written by a scribe but signed by the queen herself.

But you'll find no depictions of her. Since Octavian ordered all images of Cleopatra destroyed after her death— and since her numismatic likenesses were stylized— we don't really know what the Egyptian queen looked like, other than that she was acclaimed as a great beauty. This void has liberated artists to imagine Cleo according to their own ideals of beauty, and the final room of the exhibit displays numerous diverse examples.

Is the show worth seeing? If you, like I, once dreamt of being an Egyptologist — or if you're a fan of the TV show "Rome"— it's intriguing and informative. But if you're expecting eye-popping gold gewgaws Ó la Tut, you'll probably be disappointed.