Remember King Tut? He’s the 3,000-year-old Egyptian pharaoh with the big gold mask and entourage of ancient artifacts. I had a chance to check him out at the Art Gallery of Ontario last week. As I toured the collection and soaked in the Ancient Egyptian culture, I started to see some amazing parallels between the way the King did things back then and how us marketers do things today.

Here are six marketing lessons Tut teaches from the tomb:

1. Create a language everyone can understand.
The Egyptians developed the first written language – Hieroglyphs – about 5,000 years ago. It’s a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements made to represent objects and ideas. It took years of training to decipher the more than 2,000 characters, and it was only used in formal script. For day-to-day communication, scribes used a cursive form of writing called “hieratic” because it was quicker and easier to read.

Think of “Hieroglyphs” as the scaffolding behind your brand. Consumers don’t need to know all that stuff. They need to know how your product is going to make their lives better. Build a brand voice that delivers that information clearly and cleverly – and leave the hieroglyphs in the marketing brief.

2. One person can’t build a pyramid.
Ancient Egypt has some of history’s most revered architecture. Check out the Great Pyramids of Giza or the temples at Thebes. They were made by vast teams of tradespeople and architects and their complementary skill sets. Not to mention a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

Although the big idea may come from one person, it takes a team of people that are skilled in various areas to put it all together into a cohesive campaign. So the next time you’re doubting the power of teamwork, think of the pyramids.

3. Adapt and thrive.
The Ancient Egyptians were big adapters. They needed to be because of the constantly changing conditions of the Nile River Valley. And because of their constant innovations they were able to become one of the most advanced civilizations of their time.

Good marketers constantly survey the landscape. They stay ahead of other brand “civilizations.” And they do more than adapt to trends – they get ahead of the curve and create them.

4. Immortality through design.
The Egyptians believed they were immortal. That belief motivated many of their design choices, from the pyramids to the embalming process.

Much of what we create in marketing today serves a fleeting purpose. It’s here today, gone tomorrow. Same goes for the materials we use to make them. What would happen if we started to make work that was designed to be valuable 3,000 years from now? Or at the very least, designed to outlive the media buy?

5. Make things you’d be proud to take to your grave.
The Egyptians spent most of their lives preparing for the afterlife. They would make miniature boats, statues of workers, clothes, art, jewellery – stuff they wanted to take with them.

At risk of overstating the point, would you be proud to be buried beside the stuff you make on a daily basis? Why not?

6. Break convention. Be remarkable.
Egyptian designers loved symmetry. Balance was key. You can see examples of this all over Ancient Egypt. But in the King’s tomb, there are four statues of his favourite boat maker – a guy named Inty Shedu. Not only are these the first statues ever discovered of the same person at various stages of their life, they’re arranged asymmetrically (two small, one big, one small). Plus, all four statues have mustaches, which were considered déclassé at the time, and highly unusual to be documented in statue form.

Stand out by being different. That’s the lesson. Thinking outside the box and creating something different will set your brand apart.

History is rich with lessons for the curious marketer. These just scratch the surface of Ancient Egypt’s genius for visual communication.

If you’re interested in seeing Marketing Guru Tut in action, he’s working the crowds at the AGO in Toronto until April 18, 2010. Check it out.