Since the exhibition was first confirmed, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of Pharaohs has been one of London's hottest tickets – with the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall being drafted in to give the opening a proper sense of occasion. But is our apparent fascination more than just down to the much talked about curse?

Apparently so.

"If you look down through the history of human civilisation everyone has always gone to Egypt for inspiration," says historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes. "The Greeks and the Romans almost used 'Made in Egypt' as a rubber stamp of excellence."

There have been many surges of interest in Egyptian culture over the centuries, from the 15th century when Egyptian styles of architecture began to appear in Europe, to the early 20th, when art and fashion, design and cinema plundered the land of the Pharaohs for inspiration.

But Bettany believes some of the very bedrocks of modern culture began in the deserts of Egypt.

"There are many subtle things in our culture that we don't realise come directly from Egypt," she says. "One of the most interesting things I have discovered during my work is that the very stability of our society is something we learned from them. In the United Nations building in New York is a copy of the Treaty of Kadesh, a peace treaty signed 3,265 years ago by the Egyptians with their warring neighbours.

"It uses the phraseology of brotherhood and is an amazingly forward-looking political text saying that diplomatic solutions are better than military. This is the belief that forms the basis of the UN today."

But there are other legacies whose influence stretches back much further than modern political history, which form the very spiritual core of our culture.

Bettany says: "The Christian and Judaic obsession with the afterlife, and the belief that if you were good in life you will be rewarded after death, can be traced back to the Egyptians and was something borrowed by the Biblical writers.

"The Egyptians believed that once you died you could, if you were a good person, live out your afterlife in the Fields of the Blessed, very similar to our ideas of Heaven.

"The belongings left in the tombs were not there for protection, it was for the deceased to be able to take his material wealth with him into the afterlife.

"What's interesting, too, is that the Pyramids were built with sandstone to reflect the sun's rays during the day and literally show a stairway to heaven which is an image very familiar in Christian art.

"Their primary goddess, Isis, was a mother goddess who is invariably depicted breastfeeding her son, Horus. There is no doubt that these images inspired our portrayal of the Virgin Mary. You can almost ghost the faces of Mary and Jesus over the images of Isis and her son."

Perhaps because of the prominence of Isis in Egyptian culture, theirs was one of the first to place value on the female sex.

"Women were treated with respect and had a certain level of equality with men. Queens like Nefertiti and Cleopatra wielded real power and even ordinary women had a freedom that other more macho societies like the Roman or Greek did not permit," says Bettany.

"But women were also treated with tenderness. They were very careful with pregnant women and in Qina there exists a sanctuary which has a sanatorium, a precursor in a way of our maternity hospitals.

"It's interesting that women were giving birth all over the world but the Egyptians were the only culture to take care of them," adds Bettany, who is working on a TV series about mother love to be broadcast next year on Channel 4.

The most recent Egyptian influences were adopted in the UK around the 1890s-1920s when a wave of archaeologists were exploring the tombs.

Bettany says: "You can see the influences in the fashions of the times from which we still borrow. The clothes of that period were flowing, high-waisted styles with feather head-dresses, a silhouette similar to the dress of Egyptians.

"Fashion designers would organise trips to Egypt to search for inspiration and many perfume bottles created at that time would carry images of Cleopatra or be copied from Egyptian treasures.

"Hollywood was very much influenced, as you can see by the creation of the Egyptian Theatre, still a dominant landmark in Los Angeles, and Art Deco-style borrowed a lot from the Egyptians."

Today, we sit in some of those Egyptian-style Art Deco cinemas to watch horror films like The Mummy or to see evil witches complete with satanic black cats.

"Cats were seen as very spiritual creatures carrying good karma, an idea we borrowed – but we have sent them to the dark side instead of the good in our own superstitions. Although strangely many believe a black cat crossing your path brings good luck," says Bettany.

The Hammer House of Horror owes a debt to the Pharaohs too. "Mummies weren't discovered until 150 years ago so that whole genre of horror would not have existed if the culture hadn't captured people's imagination."

Tutankhamun And The Golden Age Of The Pharaohs opens at The 02 in London on November 15.