Within the century for the reason that discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb within the Valley of the Kings in 1922, the pharaoh’s gold dying masks has turn into a logo of historical Egypt, celebrated the world over as a masterpiece of historical artwork. It has been seen by thousands and thousands of individuals, both in Cairo or as a part of travelling exhibitions, scrutinised and analysed, but researchers proceed to make new discoveries about its historical past. Listed here are 4 belongings you in all probability didn’t find out about one of many world’s most recognisable artefacts.

Desert gold and lapis lazuli

The gold used to make Tutankhamun’s masks 3,300 years in the past was dropped at the palace workshop both from Egypt’s jap desert or Nubia, the resource-rich area south of Egypt, which the pharaohs had built-in into their expansive empire. Toiling within the desert warmth, employees floor up chunks of quartzite to free tiny fragments of gold, whereas others panned the sand. As soon as they’d gathered sufficient gold, it was moulded into ingots and despatched to craftsmen to be crushed into form. The lapis lazuli, used to kind the masks’s eyebrows and the make-up surrounding the eyes, got here from a lot additional away: the mountains of Badakhshan in Afghanistan. To entry the lapis lazuli, miners piled wooden towards the rock face and set fireplace to it. Then, they threw water over the wall, inflicting it to chill and crack, revealing the lapis lazuli. As soon as hacked free, these lumps entered the Close to Japanese commerce community, passing by means of Mesopotamia to ultimately attain Egypt, usually as a present of the Babylonian king. Different valuable stones had been collected for the masks within the deserts both aspect of the Nile Valley, whereas its obsidian pupils might have come from Ethiopia.

Was it made for anyone else?

A current evaluation of the masks’s development by the Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves means that its face part, representing an idealised portrait of the younger Tutankhamun, changed an earlier one. If this was the case, the masks initially belonged to another person. The almost definitely candidate is King Neferneferuaten, who seems to have been Tutankhamun’s predecessor and will even have been the well-known Queen Nefertiti ruling as king. Plenty of Neferneferuaten’s funerary items had been tailored for Tutankhamun’s use, suggesting that she was by no means buried with them. Intriguingly, one of many masks’s cartouches—the lengthy ovals that include two of a pharaoh’s 5 names—was modified to Tutankhamun from Neferneferuaten.

Clumsy mummy

Though Egypt’s embalmers and monks handled royal mummies with the utmost care and respect, accidents nonetheless occurred. One nook of the masks’s headdress reveals historical harm. Reeves means that Tutankhamun’s mummy might need fallen over through the funerary ceremonies, maybe when monks stood it upright for sure rituals. The discoverer of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the British archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter, discovered items of gold straps, initially wrapped across the mummy, within the room and hall outdoors the burial chamber, whereas the vulture on the prime of the masks has mysteriously misplaced its eyes. Each oddities present proof of the probability of an historical accident.

Scorching knives and paraffin lamps

Throughout Tutankhamun’s funeral, monks poured such massive quantities of resin over his mummy that when it solidified, the physique, and the gold masks it wore, had been left glued to the coffin. To free them, Carter resorted to drastic measures. First, he and his group dismembered Tutankhamun, making it simpler for them to take away the items of the king’s physique and reassemble them on a tray. However the gold masks—and Tutankhamun’s severed head inside—remained in place. Carter used heated knives to soften the resin holding Tutankhamun’s head contained in the masks, and later, hung the coffin the other way up over paraffin lamps to free the masks itself. This melted the resin, but in addition loosened most of the masks’s inlays, inflicting them to fall misplaced. Carter needed to spend days placing them again in place.

• The Story of Tutankhamun: An Intimate Lifetime of the Boy Who Turned King, Garry J. Shaw, Yale College Press, 208pp, £16.99 (hb)