ScienceEgyptian MuseumArchaeologyancient egypt

King Tut's Mask Damaged; Beard Snapped Off During Botched Cleaning

King Tut's Mask Damaged During Botched Cleaning
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(FILES) -- A picture taken on October 20, 2009 shows King Tutankhamun's golden mask displayed at the Egyptian museum in Cairo. DNA testing has unraveled some of the mystery surrounding the birth and death of pharaoh king Tutenkhamun, revealing his father was a famed monotheistic king and ruling out Nefertiti as his mother, Egypt's antiquities chief said on February 17, 2010. AFP PHOTO/KHALED DESOUKI (Photo credit should read KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/GettyImages)

One of the most priceless treasures in archaeology, the gold funerary mask of King Tutankhamun, was damaged during a cleaning attempt at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Efforts to repair the problem were also botched, according to reports.

The mask's beard snapped off during an attempt to clean the mask in October. Museum staff stuck it back on using epoxy, which leaked onto the face of the mask and dried. Then, the mask was scratched when the workers scraped off the epoxy, according to Al Araby Al Jadeed, a London-based Arabic news site.

"The mask should have been taken to the conservation lab but they were in a rush to get it displayed quickly again and used this quick drying, irreversible material," an unnamed conservator told The Associated Press.

Al Araby Al Jadeed said lighting in the room where the mask is displayed has been dimmed in an attempt to hide the damage. The epoxy is visible in an image the website posted on social media:

For comparison, here's the same part of the mask as seen in a file photo:

Both AP and Al Araby Al Jadeed said its sources were kept confidential out of fear of reprisals. One source told the AP that the beard didn't break off, but was taken off because it was loose.

AP reports that all its sources agree that in the rush to repair the mask, the epoxy was improperly used.

According to a translation of the Al Araby Al Jadeed report by Cairo Scene, damage to artifacts is supposed to be reported to the Ministry of Antiquities and then repaired by specialists. However, the head of the renovations team called her husband, who also works in renovations. He decided to fix it himself using the epoxy glue, the website said.

The tomb of King Tut was discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. Although it's believed the tomb had been robbed at least twice, many of the treasures were left behind, making it one of history's most spectacular finds. Today, the mask remains one of the most popular displays in the museum.

Here's a complete image of the mask before the botched repair:


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Before You Go

King Tut Facts
1. He was scraped from his coffin with hot knives(01 of10)
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Tut was buried in a coffin made of solid gold, so heavy it took eight strong men to lift it. But when Howard Carter and his colleague, anatomist Douglas Derry, tried to take the mummy out, they had a problem. Sticky black unguents poured over Tut during his funeral had turned rock hard over the centuries, gluing the mummy to the bottom of the box. Attempts to melt the resin in the sun didn’t work, so Carter and Derry broke off the mummy’s arms and legs, cut off its head and sawed the body in two – then scraped out the pieces with hot knives. (credit:Metropolitan Museum of Art )
2. Thieves stole his skullcap(02 of10)
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Carter did a great job of rearranging the pieces before replacing the king in his tomb. But in 1968, when Ronald Harrison, an anatomist from Liverpool University, UK, opened the coffin to X-ray the mummy, he found it in a sorry state. Thieves had rifled through the pieces and ripped off the only pieces of jewelry that Carter left in place – a delicate skullcap and golden beaded bib. The crime may have taken place during World War II, when security in the Valley of the Kings fell apart. “Somebody presumably paid a large bribe to see the mummy, saw there was some jewelry still there, and thought, ‘I’ll have that’,” says Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist at the University of Bristol, UK. (credit: Linton Reeve)
3. His penis has a straw through it(03 of10)
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One thing the thieves didn’t take was Tut’s penis. It is wrapped in bandages and measures (in its desiccated state) just over two inches long. Present and correct in the 1920s, it appeared missing in 1968. This sparked fears that the royal member had been snaffled by looters, but in 2005, CT scans confirmed it had simply fallen into the sand. Radiologist Ashraf Selim, who analyzed the scans, seems perplexed by media interest in Tut’s most precious possession. “It’s of no clinical importance for us,” he told me. But according to Mansour Boraik, head of antiquities for the region, it’s worth a look, with a straw down the middle to keep it erect, perhaps to emulate the over-sexed god of the dead, Osiris.
4. He has a really wide head(04 of10)
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Derry and Harrison both noted that at well over six inches across, Tut’s skull is impressively broad. This suggests he’s related to a mysterious pharaoh found in a nearby tomb, whose skull is almost as wide. Discovered in 1907, this tomb contained a jumble of burial goods plus a mysterious mummy with a golden collar bent round its head to make a crown, and the face and name crudely scraped from its coffin. Some think this is the defiled body of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who threw out Egypt’s traditional religion in favor of a single god. Shortly afterwards, Tut reversed those changes. The skull measurements gave the first clue that these two kings were closely related – perhaps father and son, or brothers. (credit:Getty)
5. His tomb was infested by bats(05 of10)
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Shortly after Tut’s tomb was discovered, Carter’s patron Lord Carnarvon died from complications following an infected mosquito bite. The newspapers ran heated arguments over whether he was finished off by vengeful spirits: the pharaoh’s curse was born. After murderous ghosts fell out of fashion, explanations for the curse included booby traps, from laser guns to cyanide poisoning, laid by the ancient Egyptians with the help of alien visitors. A more scientific suggestion made in the 1950s was that a killer fungus got the earl: perhaps Histoplasma, which grows in bat guano and had claimed several cavers in southern Africa. Locals confirmed that when Carter first opened Tut’s tomb, it did indeed become infested with bats until he sealed it with a solid door. (credit:Getty)
6. There’s a piece of him in Liverpool(06 of10)
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As well as X-raying King Tut in 1968, Harrison collected a scrap of the mummy’s skin and took it home in an envelope. He gave it to his colleague Robert Connolly, who developed an ingenious technique to work out Tutankhamun’s blood type. He purified the relevant molecules from the mummy’s cells and mixed them with modern human blood, in effect bringing the pharaoh’s blood group back to life. The result was A2MN, the same as the anonymous pharaoh found nearby, providing further evidence for their close relationship. Connolly still has the leftover pieces of Tut in a plastic screwcap tube, which he keeps – along with samples that Harrison collected from several other royal mummies – in a drawer on the corner of his desk. (credit:Jo Marchant)
7. He was a messenger for peace in the Middle East(07 of10)
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When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York organized a touring exhibition of Tut’s treasures in the 1970s, its director Thomas Hoving became concerned about taking responsibility for so many priceless items and tried to cancel. President Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, called the museum’s chairman. The show was “a vital part of the Middle East peace process,” he said. If the Met didn’t go ahead, the government would be “disturbed." Nixon was keen for political stability in the Middle East, and apparently saw the exhibition as a way to cement links between Egypt and the US. The tour ran from 1976-9, smashing attendance records and inspiring a hit song by Steve Martin. The Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty was signed in March 1979. (credit:Getty)
8. The Mormons want his DNA(08 of10)
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During the 1990s, two Mormon researchers, Scott Woodward and Wilfred Griggs from Brigham Young University in Utah, DNA tested several royal mummies from the 18th Dynasty – the period when Tut ruled. They aimed to reconstruct family relationships from this mysterious period of Egyptian history, but the authorities cancelled the project before they could test Tut. The official story is that his mummy was too precious to disturb. But some Egyptologists have claimed it was because of fears that they hoped to prove the pharaohs were Jewish. In 2000, a Japanese team gained permission to test Tutankhamun’s DNA, but the project was again cancelled at last minute due to “national security." (credit:Getty)
9. He wasn’t murdered…(09 of10)
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One of scientists’ main concerns has been to work out why King Tut died so young – around age 18. In 1968, Harrison saw a faint double line at the base of his skull: possible evidence of a brain haemorrhage. He announced that the king may have been hit on the head, and the story of Tut’s cruel murder made headlines worldwide. The theory spawned films and books such as the 1998 bestseller The Murder of Tutankhamun: a true story. But like so many ideas about Tut’s life and death, it is based on illusion. The double line was an artifact of the imaging process, created because the skull was X-rayed at a slight angle. It’s virtually impossible to prove that King Tut wasn’t murdered. But there isn’t a scrap of evidence that he was. (credit:Linton Reeve)
…but he may have suffered death by hippo(10 of10)
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CT scans and DNA tests recently carried out by Egyptian researchers have thrown up several theories for what killed the king, including a chariot fall that broke his leg; a weak constitution caused by his parents being brother and sister; and malaria. Other experts have refuted all these, however, so in the absence of any single convincing explanation, here’s my favorite theory. The mummy’s heart and chest are missing. Some experts think they were removed by Carter or the looters. But some, including Benson Harer, a Seattle-based physician who is one of the few people outside Egypt to gain access to the CT scans, insist that the body was mummified this way. This suggests the king died in an accident that destroyed his chest. The most likely cause of such an injury, says Harer, is a charging hippo. (credit:Getty)
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