RENÉE DREYFUS: You have everyday life. We are learning so much more about how people lived who were not royalty.

ERIC JOHNSON: That’s Renée Dreyfus, the curator in charge of ancient art at the de Young and the Legion of Honor. Or, as she’s known on social media…

RENÉE: Hey, chat. It's your girl Renée, Queen Baddie of ancient art.

ERIC: Renée oversaw a new exhibit at the de Young Museum called Treasures of the Pharaohs.

RENÉE: You know, I think a lot of people are attracted to ancient Egyptian art and culture because they were the people who, it seems, found a way to live forever.

ERIC: If you learned about ancient Egypt in school, you probably talked a lot about two things: The kings, and death: Embalming, mummies, tombs, the Book of the Dead, weighing your heart against a feather.

RENÉE: If everything was done correctly, if they were able to prove that they had led a decent life, they could find their way to immortality.

ERIC: Treasures of the Pharaohs talks about all of that, of course. But it juxtaposes the golden jewelry and sarcophagi with everyday items, including some really cool finds from the recently excavated Golden City.

RENÉE: These were the ordinary people. They were working for the pharaoh and they had their jobs. They were creating the jewelry. They had bakeries, they had kitchens, but they also had the homes of the people who lived there.

ERIC: This is Call ‘Em Like Museum, a podcast about how museums work, and why we love them. I’m Eric Johnson. Today on the podcast: What was it like to be one of the normies surrounding the pharaohs? Can a topic as popular and intensely studied as Ancient Egypt still surprise us? And why is Renée’s favorite object in the exhibition this chair? She’ll tell us about all of that and more, right after this.

ERIC: This episode is sponsored by Transistor.fm. If you are starting a podcast, then you should use Transistor. Upload your audio or video and they'll publish your episodes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocket Casts, Overcast, and more. Go to Transistor.fm for a 14-day free trial. On this podcast, we believe that everyone's experience with museums is deeply personal, and that's why we want to hear your museum stories. If you've got one, and I bet you do, please submit it at our website, likemuseum.com. Just go to the website, likemuseum.com, and click "submit a museum story" at the top of the page. It might just make it into a future episode. Thanks.

Your formal title at Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco is the George and Judy Markus Distinguished Curator in Charge of Ancient Art.

RENÉE: Correct.

ERIC: But on social media, you have a different title, I believe.

RENÉE: Oh, you've got Queen Baddie in the house!

ERIC: That's right.

RENÉE: Oh yes, you're right.

ERIC: We've got the Queen Baddie of Ancient Art.

RENÉE: I thought I was in disguise, but I guess not.

“The Romans were just the side piece of the Etruscans, absolutely mogging the Mediterranean — mogging — who were mogging the Mediterranean for 1,000 years.”

ERIC: Well, your highness, thank you for being here. Yes. So Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, for folks who don't know, there's two museums. There's the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor. You are celebrating a milestone anniversary, if I'm not mistaken, this year. How long have you worked there?

RENÉE: It's 50 years, 5-0. And just this past year we celebrated the 100th birthday of the Legion of Honor Museum, which is where my ancient art collection is housed. And I thought, oh, 100 years, big deal. I've been there half of that time. (laugh)

ERIC: When you look at the timescale, it doesn't feel like so much.

RENÉE: No, it didn't seem so much.

ERIC: Well, I do want to spend most of our time talking about Treasures of the Pharaohs, which is the new exhibition at the de Young. But first I want to talk about your personal history and relationship with museums.

RENÉE: Nice.

ERIC: A question that I ask everyone to start off is what does the word "museum" mean to you?

RENÉE: Years ago, I had a friendship with Vincent Price. You may remember him.

ERIC: Oh, sure.

RENÉE: He wasn't as scary as you might think, and so we became good friends. I asked him that same question, "What is a museum to you?" And he said, "It's a place where you go to be surprised." And I love that. I've never forgotten that he said that. It's educational, it's entertaining, but also surprising. You go in to a museum and even if you've been at that museum before many times, there's always something that's going to catch your attention that will be exciting and interesting and maybe reach a different level of understanding, something that excites you, makes you happy, or makes you think of the world in a different way. I think that's what he meant when he said be prepared to be surprised.

ERIC: It changes you on a molecular level. It changes you as a person.

RENÉE: That's exactly right. It changes you, and certainly for the better.

ERIC: Yes, I hope so. And what's your first memory of going to a museum?

RENÉE: Oh, I love this. I grew up in New York City and my first memory of a museum was the Brooklyn Museum. My parents took me there. The Brooklyn Museum has an incredible collection of ancient art — Near Eastern, Egyptian, classical — and those were the areas they couldn't pull me away from. Of course, growing up and then able to go to museums on my own, there was always the Met. I was really lucky. And then I went to school in Boston, which had a world-class museum. I've been lucky with where I've lived and the places that ... They became like second homes for me now. Since I love museums so much, it was always my dream to work in a museum. I feel so lucky to have been able to work at the Fine Arts Museums for the past 50 years. It's exactly what I always wanted to do, which is why I'm still here and working.

ERIC: I am so glad that you're here. I'm so glad you've been doing this for all these years. You made such a special impression on San Francisco through the work that you've done. So with that, let's transition. Let's talk about Treasures of the Pharaohs.

RENÉE: Cool.

ERIC: Usually when I talk to people on this podcast, one of the questions I save for the end of the conversation is what do people get wrong about your museum? But I think with this exhibition, a great place to start is ancient Egypt is so fascinating to so many people. What do people get wrong about it?

RENÉE: Oh, I think a lot of people are attracted to ancient Egyptian art and culture because they were the people who, it seems, really found a way to live forever. I mean, it was such a basic principle of their belief system that if everything was done correctly, if they were able to prove that they had led a decent life, that they could find their way to immortality. It's something that a lot of cultures have, but the Egyptians, they had it as a basic principle throughout their lives that they were going to be able to live forever in a blessed land where they would be happy and communicate with gods. What a shame, they didn't live forever, although they had a saying that to speak one's name is to make them live again. And so, so many times when I've done an Egyptian show and it's about the queen who would be king — Hatshepsut — or Ramses or King Tutankhamun, you're speaking their name.

And in the Egyptian belief system, speaking the name is to make them live again.

ERIC: I love that. A couple reactions when I've been to the Treasures of the Pharaohs exhibition. I've been there twice so far. When I was there the second time, I was looking at the wall where it had the timeline of the different periods of ancient Egyptian history, and it really struck me how big of a topic ancient Egypt is. We're talking about 3,000 years of history. How do you, working in ancient art, how do you communicate the scale of that time? Because it's not just ... When I say ancient Egypt, I'm really referring to so many people for so much time.

RENÉE: I installed an exhibition one time. It was in 2002 and it was at the Legion of Honor, and it was Egyptian art from pre-dynastic, from the earliest dynastic period all the way through into Roman times. We're talking 3,000 years of history, but also 3,000 years of art history. And that exhibition was laid out chronologically so that you're walking through time, you could see similarities in the Egyptian style and the way they presented their beliefs and their everyday life. That was a very interesting way to present the art because you could see similarities. Sometimes they went back in time because that was a wonderful period of time when Egypt was strong and they want to go back to that period. So they do archaicizing. They're going back in time to present the art the way it was at an earlier period because that's the way they like to think of themselves, identifying with a golden age perhaps.

This exhibition instead presents a different narrative. The chronology is not as important, although we do have things from the first dynasty through the 3,000 years of history. But the concept that we start with is kind of the top of the pyramid, which is divine kingship, the most important person in Egypt throughout time. And this goes back to the earliest history that we have about ancient Egypt, that the king was the ruler, but he was also a god.

ERIC: One of Renée’s favorite objects in the exhibition is this schist sculpture of the king Menkaure, who had the smallest pyramid at Giza. Here’s what she said when we looked at it in person.

RENÉE: “And he's shown striding forward. He's in the middle, and it's made out of this gorgeous black schist, which is very hard to carve. But he's wearing the crown of Upper Egypt, and he wears the royal kilt. And he's surrounded on both sides by figures that represent deities. On his right, our left, is the goddess Hathor, and you know that because of her cow's horns and the sun disk that she wears.

And on his left side — of lesser importance, because you see he's smaller in size — is the personification of the region of Thebes, which is where Menkaure's capital city is. It tells you in one glance that the pharaoh is not only a ruler, but he is a divine ruler, and he is at home with the gods, and they accept him as one of their own.”

And then to understand the social history of the ancient Egyptians, we then spread it out and we talk about those people who were close to the king, those people who helped him uphold the sense of he was in charge of everything: their religious beliefs, their daily life, what their thoughts are about death and the afterlife. So we go through the social hierarchy in this exhibition, and because of that, the chronological history isn't as critical.

ERIC: And as you work farther down the pyramid, to use your phrasing there, one of the rooms of this exhibition is about the Golden City. Could you talk about what that room means to you and why you wanted to juxtapose the objects from the Golden City with the pharaohs?

RENÉE: It's part of the section in the people surrounding the king. And in fact, the Golden City is a brand new discovery. It was found by Zahi Hawass, the eminent Egyptologist from Egypt, and his team. They were looking for the mortuary temple of King Tut, and they had a clue where to find it and they started digging. And instead they found the walls of a city that is so well preserved that it looks like people left it maybe yesterday. It's an extraordinary city. And as they're excavating, now, this extraordinary discovery — I mean, it's the most significant discoveries maybe since King Tut's tomb in the 1920s. It really is a city that is comprised of a residential area, an administrative area, and workshops.

So the workshops are the people who prepared everything that the king needed. This was a king whose name was Amenhotep III. He lived during the golden age of Egypt. He was a new-kingdom pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. What is significant about it is that Amenhotep III and his wife, Queen Tiye, had a son whose name was Amenhotep IV, not surprisingly.

ERIC: Makes sense.

RENÉE: But he changed his name to Akhenaten, and he's the pharaoh who said there's only one god and not a plethora of gods, the many, many gods that the Egyptians worshiped. One wonders, you have Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, and after Amenhotep III died, they moved the capital city from near where this new Golden City was discovered in Luxor. They move it to Amarna. And when they moved to Amarna, people pick up and they follow him. These are all his workers.

They leave a lot of things behind. And people always ask me, "You're showing things that were important to the upper classes. What about daily life? What about the ordinary people?" These were the ordinary people. They were working for the pharaoh and they had their jobs. They were creating the jewelry, which by the way, Zahi Hawass thinks is the jewelry that was made there is was what was found in King Tut's tomb.

ERIC: Wow.

RENÉE: But also they had bakeries, they had kitchens, they had the administrative sections, but they also had the homes of the people who lived there. In the exhibition, you'll see a baby's rattle. I mean, there were children's toys. There was a manufacturing area where they were creating children's toys. They created the amulets that people were using and the king was using. You have everyday life, you have pots that were made to hold food and drink. We are learning so much more about how people lived who were not royalty. But at the same time, we're learning that it wasn't just Akhenaten who said that there was only one god and it was the Aten, the disc of the sun. We're seeing that it was already in place during the time of Amenhotep III and his wife Queen Tiye. So it's a significant discovery in so many ways, and it's continuing to give because it's still being excavated now.

And this is the first time that any of these objects have been out of Egypt and probably the first time that they've actually been on view. I'm very excited about this being in the exhibition.

ERIC: As you should be. That's a perfect segue to my next question, which is that most of the objects here — correct me if I'm wrong — came from the Cairo Egyptian Museum and there's others that came from the Luxor Museum, the ones that from this new Golden City. Could you talk about your relationship with these other museums? How do you convince them to trust you with their country's history and their museum collection? I mean, these are so important to these Egyptian museums.

RENÉE: Let me tell you first how I found out about this exhibition.

ERIC: Please.

RENÉE: I'm always on the lookout for some exhibition that might have a phenomenal object list. And I had a phone call with Zahi Hawass and he said, "Have I got an exhibition for you." I mean, this is somebody I've known since, I don't know, he was a student. And I said, "Well, I'd like to see the object list." And they sent the object list and all of a sudden I'm looking at all of the stars from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in Tahrir Square. And then I'm seeing the Golden City objects, and then I'm seeing the tomb groups from two specific tombs that are phenomenal, and we can talk about those. And then to find out that Tareq Al Awadhi — he was a former director of the Cairo Museum — that he has chosen the objects. So you have the actual director who is a well-trained Egyptologist and archeologist, he is the person who decided on the themes that I mentioned earlier. And I looked at it and I said, "This is a perfect way to be able to present life in ancient Egypt, looking at the social hierarchy, but then looking to see these splendid objects. Some of them are the real iconic works that people go to Egypt to see. These are really splendid works of art. The exhibition was first on view in Rome, and it was organized by a company in Rome that does exhibitions. They hadn't thought of bringing it to America, but when we had the chance to go and look at the exhibition in Rome, immediately we knew we needed to sign up for it. So we are the first institution, the first museum, to have these objects in America. After we close, it goes to the Kimball Museum. Those are the two museums that are in the United States, and then it goes traveling elsewhere.

So I just think we're so lucky to have these objects. And it's never easy to negotiate with the Egyptian government, but in the end, they were so thrilled with our installation. Zahi Hawass said to them, "It's a hundred times better than Rome." And of course, I knew it would be. (laugh)

ERIC: I like the self-confidence there. You know what you're doing by now.

RENÉE: Yeah, you're talking to Queen Baddie, so yeah.

ERIC: Hey, if you're enjoying the episode, then make sure to follow the podcast in whatever app you're using right now. It's free, and it makes sure that new episodes will show up automatically. If you're on YouTube, then hit subscribe there too. Thank you so much.

If you're a fan of this show, then you probably love museums. And if you love museums, then you know that the best shop in the world is the museum gift shop. So we put together something just for you: the gift shop giveaway. To enter, sign up for our free newsletter at likemuseum.com. That's likemuseum.com. Thanks for listening and thanks for being part of this community.

Can you think about your favorite object? I know it's impossible to pick just one, but think about a favorite object in the exhibition. If you imagine that we're walking towards it, what do we see? What do you notice about it? How does it make you feel?

RENÉE: Okay. We're going into a room that is a gallery full of objects that come from the tomb of the in-laws of Amenhotep III. Their names are Yuya and Thuya. There's a big gold coffin of Thuya in the middle of that gallery, and it takes you like a magnet to go and see it. It's absolutely extraordinary with its inlays and how alive the face looks. But on your way there, you pass a piece of furniture and it's made out of wood and it has gold and silver inlay. In the backrest of the chair, you see the owner of it. It's a throne that belonged to their grandchild, Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye's daughter. Sitamun is her name. And you see her two times on the backrest, sitting in a chair just like this one. She was a princess. This was her throne.

It's an absolutely beautiful example. It is so ... I mean, the condition, it's intact and it's gorgeous.

It's a piece of furniture that I've known for a really long period of time, and here it is in that gallery. And what makes it special, and I'm sure I'm reading into it a little bit but not too much, is her grandparents are being laid to rest and they are buried in the Valley of the Kings, even though they're not royalty. Remember, it's their daughter, Tiye, who is royalty, and I can just hear her saying to her husband, Amenhotep III, "They're my parents and I want them buried as if they were royalty," and in fact they were. Here's their granddaughter believing that they're going to have a blessed afterlife, wanting them to remember her throughout eternity, knowing that this was an object that was precious to her. She used it. There's signs of wear. It makes me think that she loved her grandparents and wanted them to remember her.

It's a mesmerizing object, especially when you consider why would it have been found in the tomb of Thuya and Yuya? They had lots of precious objects in their tomb, but this is one that was put there by their granddaughter.

ERIC: I assume for any grandparent visiting the exhibition — both the grandparents and for the mother-in-laws that are visiting the exhibition — take notes in these rooms.

RENÉE: And anybody who loved their grandparents. Many of us had grandparents who were significant in our lives.

ERIC: Yes.

RENÉE: So anyhow, I love that piece, but every gallery has something that is significant and beautiful, and I could go on and on about, I'm afraid.

ERIC: What's a small detail in the exhibition that most people would miss, but which you absolutely love?

RENÉE: There's a stone carving of the mayor of Thebes during the time of Amenhotep II. So Amenhotep II, he ruled from Thebes, and the mayor of Thebes was a man named Sennefer. There is a statue of Sennefer and his wife and their child, a little diminutive figure standing between them, but they have their arms around each other. Now, there are statues that show the husbands and wives with their arms around each other, but the sculptor — you have to walk around to the back of the sculpture — and the sculptor has carved the upper part of the throne they're sitting at so that you could see their hands around each other's shoulders.

ERIC: Yes.

RENÉE: A sign of love and also respect because there are, what, eight rows of Egyptian hieroglyphs on the back. On the side of Sennefer are his four lines of Egyptian hieroglyphs. On his wife's side, there are the hieroglyphs, and she had a significant role as well in the entourage, in the king's ... the people who surrounded the king. It's all about her. It's important to think that there are women in ancient Egypt who had the respect and the appreciation that they were shown, in this case, equivalent in some ways to their husbands.

ERIC: Was that common? Was that typical in surviving ancient Egyptian art for women to be depicted as equal, of the same size, or of equal importance as the men?

RENÉE: Not at all. You'll see them, oftentimes the woman has her arm around the man, but he doesn't have his around her. But also in these couple sculptures, you might just hear, if there's hieroglyphs, you might just hear about the husband, the man, not necessarily the woman as well. So when you see something like that and there is this movement towards equality, it's not 100% equality. He's wearing necklaces around his neck that are rows and rows of gold beads that have been given to him by the king. He was so admired and respected and appreciated by the king that he gave Sennefer rewards of those necklaces. But sometimes, and you'll see in the exhibition, there's a relief sculpture that show the women can have those necklaces as well. It is a patriarchal society. There's one sculpture in the exhibition showing the queen who would be king — another Queen Baddie — who made herself king over Egypt: Hatshepsut.

ERIC: And she has a beard on, if I remember correctly, right? She's wearing a beard.

RENÉE: To be a king, you had to look like a king. And the attributes of kingship were you had to have the full spirit of kingship, you had to wear the kilt, you had to wear a crown or a head covering of some kind, but nothing else. And so she is shown as a man. She was not a cross dresser in real life, and there are images of her where she's dressed as a woman, but in many of the statues where they were placed in important areas within the kingdom, she could be shown as a man and was shown as a man.

ERIC: Thinking about all of the different exhibitions that you've worked on about various ancient civilizations, what have you not been able to do yet? Do you have a white whale, sort of a focus or a story that you want to tell that you haven't been able to bring to America yet?

RENÉE: Yes. I want to do an ancient Near Eastern exhibition. I've done classical shows. The Etruscan exhibition that just closed was monumentally important to express the culture of the Etruscans. I've done the Egyptian shows. I'm the only curator who did the King Tut show two times, 30 years apart.

ERIC: Yes. The one that came to the de Young in 1979, if I'm not mistaken, right?

RENÉE: Absolutely right. And then 2009, I did it again, and I was very happy to see how much I had learned within those 30 years.

ERIC: Oh, tell me about that. Yeah. What changed in those 30 years? How do you think you have changed as an ancient art expert over that span of time?

RENÉE: Oh, when it first came, and I, of course, studied ancient Egyptian culture and art and history. I mean, I was a young curator, I had not worked with the objects. I had not had the experience of quite a few other Egyptian collections, but also I've added significantly to our permanent collection of Egyptian art here in those 30 years. We have some wonderful things that I've had a chance to study and examine. But the other thing that is important is there are always new discoveries and there's new ways of putting Egyptian art into a context. And so within those 30 years, there's so much new information about ancient Egypt. I was able to install it quite differently, but then at the same time have this unique experience of having some of these great treasures from the Boy King. I like to say when the Boy King was here, I was the girl curator. That was 1979.

ERIC: (laugh)

RENÉE: But you learn and you have experience working with the objects, and then you try to stay on top of all the new discoveries and the new ideas around the king. The second time I did the King Tut show, I knew so much more. I mean, he died at such a young age and people used to think, how could he have accomplished anything? He was young when he came on and became the pharaoh. And then he died, let's see, 17, 18 years old. But remember, we talked about Akhenaten. Now we know that Akhenaten was his father. Didn't know that before. DNA testing. I mean, there are all kinds of things that we've come upon. Nefertiti was not his mother, it was another queen. But the public was not happy with only one god that Akhenaten, his father, had done. Akhenaten taxed the temples and the priests didn't like it.

And when Tutankhamun came on — his name was originally Tut-ankh-aten named after the sun disc. He went back to being -amun. He went back to saying ... He refurbished a lot of the temples. The priests could once again teach their basic religious ideas and principles of polytheism. So now we knew so much more about him than in 1979. So it really opened the doors to being able to tell a more comprehensive story.

ERIC: So I'm sorry, I interrupted you before. You were starting to talk about a white whale or an exhibition that you would love to oversee in the future.

RENÉE: I have not done a major show on the ancient Near East or Western Asia, maybe now that we're calling it. I just want to say, you asked me also about an object in the exhibition that just calls out to me.

ERIC: Yes.

RENÉE: And it is in the last gallery, and those are discoveries from intact royal tombs that were only discovered in 1939, 1940. And they would've been world famous. They would've hit the headlines. They would've been on the front page of all the newspapers except for the fact of World War II. So nobody knew about these discoveries. And these are extraordinary objects. And one of the objects in the exhibition is a large necklace of lapis lazuli beads that has been restrung by an Egyptian. So there are gold balls as well and a gold clasp in the back. But what makes it extraordinary is that there is an Assyrian lapis lazuli gorgeous blue bead that has a cuneiform inscription on it. And what I like to talk about, I mean, this is from the same period of time, the Assyrians from today's Northern Iraq had commerce with the Egyptians at about 1000 BC.

They overlapped in time. And what I like to do is to talk about who knew whom and the interrelationships.

ERIC: Yes.

RENÉE: And that's the kind of show I would like to do.

ERIC: As soon as you do, I will buy a ticket, day one. You just let me know whenever that's coming.

RENÉE: All right.

ERIC: That sounds fascinating. Yeah. We were talking at the start of this conversation about how museums can captivate you, can surprise you, can change you on a molecular level. Let's also talk about the Etruscans exhibit that recently closed at the Legion of Honor. What was surprising there? How did that change you, overseeing that exhibition?

RENÉE: The Etruscan exhibition took many years for me to organize and a lot of negotiating with colleagues and museum directors around the world, really, to understand the ancient Etruscans. They were people who I always was fascinated about, the Met had their collection of Etruscan art when I was growing up. And I wondered why it was that people didn't understand that, in the ancient world, you don't go from the Greeks to the Romans and then from the Romans to us. There was another step and it was the Etruscans. So you go from the Greeks to the Etruscans, the Etruscans to the Romans. Romans stood on the shoulders of the Etruscans.

ERIC: Yes.

RENÉE: While working on that exhibition, I read a lot, I learned a lot. I was able to convince museum directors that objects that had never before been lent, why they were necessary to tell the story, the narrative about the ancient Etruscans. And the different sections of the Etruscan exhibition fell into place so beautifully. So the narrative was extremely clear as you walk from gallery to gallery. Never in all of my years of working on exhibitions, museum exhibitions, have I had this experience of people saying, "Oh, you're the curator? Oh, let me thank you. This is the most beautiful exhibition I have ever seen."

ERIC: Oh wow.

RENÉE: Or "This is the most important exhibition I've ever seen." And the one that I liked the best is the woman who came up to me and she said, "This exhibition makes my heart sing." Even my own show came out to be even more important and more significant. And talking about changing people on the molecular basis, people really felt that they learned so much about the ancient Etruscans and many have never heard of them before. They never even heard the name. Somebody said, "What's your next show?" And I said, "The Etruscans." "Oh, the crustaceans. That's interesting."

ERIC: (laugh)

RENÉE: Or I said, "Siri, show me something about the Etruscans." And they came up with a picture of a trash can.

ERIC: The ancient Egyptians had a much better marketing team. They're much better known.

RENÉE: Yeah. Yeah. And the Greeks and the Romans certainly did, yes.

ERIC: Yes.

RENÉE: Good PR.

ERIC: You got it. Yeah.

Coming up on the end of the interview here, I have one more question for you. When you are in any museum gift shop, what do you buy?

RENÉE: Whoa! Oh, I'm a sucker for books, catalogs in books. But if there's a really good reproduction of a piece of jewelry, I guess that could be my Achilles heel.

ERIC: You are the first person to say jewelry. I'm glad to have a new answer. Yes.

RENÉE: Yeah. Oftentimes museum stores have the best collection of books and not just about art history, but about culture and civilization and sometimes philosophy. So I'm on the lookout for those books.

ERIC: And I was very amused in the gift shop for this exhibition, they sell the hat that is worn by the famous Egyptologist who you worked with.

RENÉE: And the reason why it's there, and I'm just glad you mentioned that because I was kind of the intermediary to make that happen, is because the proceeds from the sale of those hats goes — thanks to Zahi Hawass himself — it goes to a children's cancer hospital.

ERIC: Fantastic. What a great cause. What a great exhibition. Renée, you really are a queen. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's wonderful talking to you.

RENÉE: Thank you so much, Eric. This was fun.

ERIC: Thanks again to Renée Dreyfus for coming on the podcast! Treasures of the Pharaohs is running at the de Young Museum through the end of January, 2027. And as part of our gift shop giveaway, I’m giving away a something really fun that I bought in the exhibition gift shop. It’s a glasses case that looks like Thuya’s coffin lid, with a matching lens cloth inside. To enter, all you have to do is sign up for our free email newsletter at likemuseum.com. Call ‘Em Like Museum is hosted and edited by me, Eric Johnson. It’s produced out of my podcast agency in San Francisco, LightningPod. Our social media specialist is Julia Wilde, artwork by Rhe Civitello. Special thanks this week to Francisco Rosas and Lindsay Wright. And thank you for listening! I’ll see you at the museum.