When King Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered in 1922, the world instantly craved a firsthand sighting of the golden sarcophagus, exquisite funerary jewels and divine chariots accompanying the Boy King through the Big Sleep. Nearly 90 years later the enthusiasm and the entrepreneurial desire to exploit it continues. "King Tut has partnered with some of the best retail stores, hotels, shows and restaurants in the Times Square area to offer you the King Tut Golden Partner program," is the sales pitch accompanying the Tut exhibition currently drawing mid-Manhattan tourists to look back three millenniums. (29.50 per adult, add 5 for the 3-D "Mummies" film.) Such naked commercialism began with the first cracking of the tomb. But at least Egypt's government is partnering with the private company's Times Square show. Egypt has rightly been demanding that governments and museums return fundamental parts of its patrimony that have disappeared from ancient troves. It has had no success thus far with a 3,200-year-old burial mask at the Saint Louis Art Museum, a bust of Nefertiti in Germany, or the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has been far more responsible. And it has now volunteered to return 19 artifacts including a tiny bronze dog and a bracelet sphinx that museum experts recently concluded were from Tut's tomb. They were traced not to plunderers, but to purchases and bequeathals from the estate of Howard Carter, the British archeologist stunned upon opening the tomb. "I have many fights," Egypt's antiquity chief, Zahi Hawass, said, "but never with the Met." The 19 artifacts go on farewell display at the Met next year. Meantime, they are tucked into Tut's Times Square show, just across from "The Merchant of Venice" and "The Phantom of the Opera."