Twenty artefacts from a buried Egyptian city that archaeologists stumbled on while looking for a king's mortuary temple go on public display in North America for the first time this week, as part of a travelling exhibition opening at the de Young Museum in San Francisco on 1 August 2026.

The exhibition, "Treasures of the Pharaohs," brings more than 100 objects on loan from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Luxor Museum to the United States. Its run at the de Young runs through 31 January 2027, after which it travels to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, from 14 March to 19 September 2027 The Art Newspaper.

The headline draw is material from the settlement known as the Golden City, or "the Dazzling Aten," a 14th-century BC site on Luxor's west bank uncovered in 2021. Archaeologist Zahi Hawass was searching for the mortuary temple of Tutankhamun when the city emerged instead. Archaeology magazine later named it the most important archaeological discovery of that year.

What the archaeologists found was not a tomb complex but a working settlement: workshops, homes, and an administrative centre built for the people who served the pharaoh. The city dates to the reign of Amenhotep III, who ruled between approximately 1390 BC and 1352 BC and was likely Tutankhamun's grandfather. It was largely abandoned after Amenhotep's son, Akhenaten, moved the Egyptian capital to Amarna and instituted worship of the sun god Aten — a religious upheaval that emptied the settlement.

Tarek El Awady, a former director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, curated the exhibition. Renée Dreyfus, a curator at the de Young, organised its San Francisco presentation.

The show spans a wide arc of ancient Egyptian history. It opens with an Old Kingdom statue of the Triad of Mycerinus, depicting the pharaoh Menkaure alongside the goddess Hathor and a local deity. More than 1,000 years later, in the same gallery route, visitors encounter a limestone carving of Akhenaten and his family worshipping Aten — the same shift in religious practice that emptied the Golden City itself. Among the everyday objects from the settlement is a limestone headrest, the kind of pillow ancient Egyptians slept on.

For visitors, the appeal is straightforward: these are objects that left the ground only five years ago, and most of the public has never had the chance to see them. The Golden City material sits alongside longer-known loans from two of Egypt's most prominent museums, placing finds from a single working settlement in the wider context of pharaonic art spanning centuries.

An accompanying catalogue, short guide, and children's guide have been published to coincide with the exhibition.