King Tut’s beard ‘glued back on after knock’

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo 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 most treasured exhibits.

Three of the museum’s conservators gave differing accounts of when the incident occurred last year.

They agree, however, that orders came from above to fix it quickly and that an inappropriate adhesive was used.

“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 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 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.”

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 a colleague used a spatula to remove it, leaving scratches.

The first conservator, who inspects the artefact regularly, confirmed the scratches.

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 long-time autocrat Hosni Mubarak.