PM Inspects Tutankhamun’s Golden Coffin at GEM

Egyptian Prime Minister Dr. Mostafa Madbouli inspected on Saturday the golden wooden coffin of the boy-king Tutankhamun at the Grand Egyptian Museum GEM.

Madbouli was accompanied by Minister of Antiquities Dr. Khaled Al-Anani, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of the Antiquities Dr. Mostafa Waziri and general supervisor of the GEM project, Atef Moftah.

Tutankhamun’s coffin will be displayed in GEM along with other golden coffins which were placed at the Egyptian Museum at Tahrir Square.

Dr. Al-Anani said that the coffin was transported from southern Egypt to the GEM in July 2019 “in order to be restored for the first time since the tomb’s discovery”.

“The coffin has suffered a lot of damage, including cracks in the golden layers of plaster and a general weakness in all golden layers,” said Eissa Zidan, Head of the First Aid Restoration Department at the GEM.

“The restoration work will take about eight months” he added.

Tutankhamun was an Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, during the period of Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom. He has, since the discovery of his intact tomb, been referred to colloquially as King Tut.

His original name, Tutankhaten, means “the living image of Aten“, while Tutankhamun means “the living image of Amun.” In hieroglyphs, the name Tutankhamun was typically written Amun-tut-ankh because of a scribal custom that placed a pine name at the beginning of a phrase to show appropriate reverence. He is possibly also the Nibhurrereya of the Amarna letters, and likely the 18th dynasty king Rathotis who, according to Manetho, an ancient historian, had reigned for nine years—a figure that conforms with Flavius Josephus‘s version of Manetho’s Epitome.

The 1922 discovery by Howard Carter of Tutankhamun’s nearly intact tomb, funded by Lord Carnarvon, received worldwide press coverage. It sparked a renewed public interest in ancient Egypt, for which Tutankhamun’s mask, now in the Egyptian Museum, remains a popular symbol. In February 2010, genetic testing confirmed that he was the son of the mummy found in the tomb KV55, believed by some to be Akhenaten. His mother was his father’s sister and wife, whose name is unknown but whose remains are positively identified as The Younger Lady mummy found in KV35.[8] The deaths of a few involved in the discovery of Tutankhamun’s mummy have been popularly attributed to the curse of the pharaohs, according to wikipedia.