TutmaniaThe craze on shellac

No microphone was there. The record shops got the story instead.

When Howard Carter opened the burial chamber, broadcasting was two years old and there was no such thing as an off-air recording of a news bulletin — which is why no radio coverage of the discovery survives anywhere. What survives is the craze it set off. Within months Tin Pan Alley had a hit novelty in Old King Tut, the vaudeville comics were touring the tomb in dialect, and every dance band in New York had an “Egyptian” foxtrot on the stand. Every side here is public domain, and some of it is period orientalism — kept as the record of what 1923 actually sounded like.