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Tutankhamun's beard glued back on, say Egyptian museum conservators Tutankhamun's beard glued back on, say Egyptian museum conservators
(about 12 hours later)
The blue and gold braided beard on the burial mask of famed pharaoh Tutankhamun was hastily glued back on with epoxy, damaging the relic after it was knocked during cleaning, conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo said on Wednesday. Was he murdered? Was he the product of incest? Ever since his tomb was discovered in 1922, Tutankhamun has always been a man of mystery. But now the pharaoh is the subject of yet another whodunnit – and this time the mystery is a very modern one.
The museum is one of the city’s main tourist sites, but in some areas, ancient wooden sarcophagi lay unprotected from the public, while pharaonic burial shrouds, mounted on walls, crumble from behind open panels of glass. Tutankhamun’s mask, over 3,300 years old, and other contents of his tomb are its top exhibits. Did bungling curators snap off Tut’s beard last year, and if so, was it stuck back on with the wrong kind of glue?
Three of the museum’s conservators reached by telephone gave differing accounts of when the incident occurred last year, and whether the beard was knocked off by accident while the mask’s case was being cleaned, or was removed because it was loose. These are the allegations levelled this week at the Egyptian Museum, the gloomy, underfunded palace in central Cairo where Tutankhamun’s bling is housed, along with thousands of other ancient treasures. Employees claim the beard was dislodged in late 2014, during routine maintenance of the showcase in which Tut’s mask is kept.
They agree however that orders came from above to fix it quickly and that an inappropriate adhesive was used. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals. “What happened is that one night they wanted to fix the lighting in the showcase, and when they did that they held the mask in the wrong way and broke the beard,” alleges one museum official, who asked not to be named for fear of being fired. “But they tried to fix it overnight with the wrong material, but it wasn’t fixed in the right way so the next day, very early, they tried to fix it again.
“Unfortunately he used a very irreversible material — epoxy has a very high property for attaching and is used on metal or stone but I think it wasn’t suitable for an outstanding object like Tutankhamun’s golden mask,” one conservator said. “The problem was that they tried to fix it in half an hour and it should have taken them days.”
“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,” the conservator added. Both the director of the museum, Mahmoud el-Halwagy, and the head of its conservation department, Elham Abdelrahman, strenuously denied the claims, in a joint interview yesterday. Halwagy says the beard never fell off, and that without doubt nothing has happened to it since he was appointed director in October.
The conservator said that the mask now shows a gap between the face and the beard, whereas before it was directly attached. “Now you can see a layer of transparent yellow,” the conservator said. The issue, he and Abdelrahman maintain, is that well before he arrived at the museum, conservators were concerned that at some point in the future the beard might become loose. So they applied an adhesive – provided and sanctioned by the antiquities ministry – that turned out to be a little too conspicuous.
Another museum conservator, who was present at the time of the repair, said that epoxy had dried on the face of the boy king’s mask and that a colleague used a spatula to remove it, leaving scratches. The first conservator, who inspects the artifact regularly, confirmed the scratches and said it was clear that they had been made by a tool used to scrape off the epoxy. “This is the problem,” Halwagy said. “It’s too visible.”
Egypt’s tourist industry, once a pillar of the economy, has yet to recover from three years of tumult following a 2011 uprising that toppled the autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Fortunately, by Halwagy’s account, the eagle-eyed director noticed the problem himself soon after arriving in his post, and now the issue is in the hands of an expert committee, who will investigate the issue, and release a report detailing their findings at a later date.
Museums and the opening of new tombs are part of plans to revive the industry. But authorities have made no significant improvements to the Egyptian Museum since its construction in 1902, and plans to move the Tutankhamun exhibit to its new home in the Grand Egyptian Museum scheduled to open in 2018 have yet to be divulged. For her part, Abdelrahman is mystified about the source of the breakage claim, and says the museum hierarchy would never have dreamt of covering up such a thing. “If it was broken, it would have been a big problem, and we would have written a report about it,” she said.
Neither the antiquities ministry nor the museum administration could be reached for comment on Wednesday evening. One of the conservators said an investigation was under way and that a meeting had been held on the subject earlier in the day. If the claim is true, Chris Naunton, director of the Egypt Exploration Society, and the maker of a recent documentary about Tutankhamun, says it may be unprecedented.
The burial mask, discovered by British archeologists Howard Carter and George Herbert in 1922, sparked worldwide interest in archaeology and ancient Egypt when it was unearthed along with Tutankhamun’s nearly intact tomb. “I’ve not heard of the beard being removed before – the death mask is incomparably important and valuable and would normally be handled with the utmost care,” says Naunton, who has viewed photographs of the allegedly damaged mask. “If these are genuine photos, it does look like something happened there. I just couldn’t believe it when I saw it. It just looks too bad to believe.”
“From the photos circulating among restorers I can see that the mask has been repaired, but you can’t tell with what,” Egyptologist Tom Hardwick said. Last year, archaeologists alleged that a ministry-sponsored effort had botched the restoration of the world’s oldest pyramid, while other critics say the government’s approach to Egyptology is too rigid and old-fashioned.
“Everything of that age needs a bit more attention, so such a repair will be highly scrutinized.”