Priceless Ancient Treasures Leave Greece for First Time | National Geographic

[Music] Some of the objects are so valuable that it's like what we call hand carry, and that's basically the courier is handcuffed to the briefcase and escorted through security.

The golden wreath of Meup, it's like a crown, would have gone on her head and it would have glittered and shimmered and shook as she walked around. So, how do you pack something like that to travel? Imagine that it has to fly across the Atlantic.

It ended up going to Canada, taking a truck getting here. They basically built a box, put the crown in on its stand and then filled the box full of teeny tiny little Styrofoam balls so that it was absolutely frozen in space.

It's a brilliant, simple way to transport a priceless treasure that is so delicate that if you even blew on it, it would have moved and glittered.

It's the story of the Greeks themselves—Greek civilization, where they came from and how great figures like Agamemnon and Alexander the Great came to be. It's the first time for many of these artifacts to travel to North America, to the United States, and some of them have never left their cases before in Greece.

Our first rock star person in the exhibition is Agamemnon, pretty much a mythical story which came from the Homeric poems that were recited in oral tradition. Heinrich Schliemann was smitten reading Homer, thinking that it was absolutely real, so he went and excavated a royal circle of burials and found five golden tombs.

The mask that we have on display in front is actually the one that Heinrich Schliemann, in the 1870s, picked off of the ground. He saw a skull behind it and said, "I'm looking into the eyes of Agamemnon."

We have a hoplite sculpture, a very famous sculpture from Sparta; it's called the sculpture of Leonidas. We don't really know who it is—it's some soldier, but it's super metaphorical about the epic fight that the Greek city-states had against the Persians and that battle of Thermopylae that was led by Leonidas.

It was basically a cloud raining down arrows from the Persians, so much so that they eliminated the 300 Spartans that were there. We've been working on this exhibition for about five years. A group from National Geographic visited Greece and made a proposal to the minister of culture to do something really outrageous—tell the story of 5,000 years of civilization, something that a normal art museum wouldn't do.

We have one of the most famous sculptural heads of Alexander the Great. This exhibition ends basically with his coronation and after that, Alexander brings Greek culture to the rest of the known world at that time. That's where we come from.

Greece is an incredible country; it was the largest, most complete T-Rex that had ever been found. It's a very complete specimen of T-Rex—it's probably about 85% complete. The animal is something like 40 feet long.