King Tut’s chariot, bed get new home

Treasures harbour secrets

CAIRO, May 24, (AFP): The first of the many wondrous artefacts found in Egyptian boy king Tutankhamun’s tomb were transported carefully through Cairo’s streets on Tuesday to their new home near the Giza Pyramids.

The still unfinished new Grand Egyptian Museum at the foot of the pyramids will eventually house the collections of the current brimming museum in the city’s Tahrir Square.

A gilded bed and a funeral chariot from Tutankhamun’s tomb — discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922 — were transferred on Tuesday, well packed in wooden containers complete with materials to protect them from both heat and vibration.

Two trucks bearing the ancient treasures pulled up at the new Grand Egyptian Museum shortly before 1600 GMT, escorted by police vehicles.

In one of the galleries of the new complex, technicians wearing white gloves gingerly unwrapped the precious objects.

Relocating the two pieces forms part of a joint programme with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to restore, pack and transport 71 items from the existing museum to the new facility, an antiquities ministry statement said.

“During the next weeks and months we’re going to transfer regularly more than 1,000 remaining objects in Cairo museum to be restored and prepared for the exhibition here in the first half of 2018,” said Antiquities Minister Khaled alEnany.

“Today is a big event ... today we start transferring big objects,” he said.

The Grand Egyptian Museum had been scheduled to open in 2015, but construction has lagged as expenses mounted to more than $1 billion.

The museum is now scheduled to open partially in 2018.

Eventually, the vast complex will house more than 100,000 relics including the 4,500 pieces of Tutankhamun’s treasure discovered in the southern Valley of the Kings in Luxor.

But the young pharaoh’s mummy will remain in his tomb as it is too fragile to transport.

He died at the age of 19 in the year 1324 BC after a nine-year reign.

Al-Enany

Artefacts

This first set of Tutankhamun artefacts destined for the new museum includes three funeral beds, five chariots and 57 pieces of textiles.

Bas-reliefs of the pharaoh Snefru, founder of the 4th dynasty, are also among the 71 selected objects being moved.

The funerary bed moved on Tuesday is gilded and features posts made of carved lion heads, representing Sekhmet, the goddess of war and healing.

The huge GEM complex will extend over 47 hectares (116 acres) and contain some 24,000 square metres (258,300 square feet) of permanent exhibition space.

It will feature alabaster facades, and its eventual opening will relieve the pressure on the current national museum that was inaugurated in 1902 and has run out of space.

Construction of the massive new archaeological facility museum was announced in 2002.

But its opening has been postponed several times, including because of the political instability that has rocked the country.

The current rose-pink museum with its neoclassical facade was a tourist highlight before the January 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, unleashing years of political turmoil which led to plummeting tourist numbers.

It also contains so many items that many have been kept in storage and never seen by the public.

During the uprising, looters broke into the building and several ancient treasures were damaged or stolen.

Its world-famous star attraction — literally the face of the museum — is the golden funeral mask of Tutankhamun which contains more than 10 kilos (22 pounds) of gold and precious stones.

Initially budgeted at $800 million, the new Grand Egyptian Museum’s costs have now passed the billion-dollar mark.

Mystery

In related news, the legendary treasure of ancient Egypt’s boy king Tutankhamun, whose tomb British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor in 1922, is shrouded in mystery.

The tomb of Tutankhamun, is pharaonic Egypt’s only mausoleum found so far with its burial artefacts intact.

Many other resting places of pharaohs and dignitaries had been pillaged by tomb robbers down the centuries.

But in this case, a hoard of more than 4,500 objects laid out across five rooms included thrones, statues, furniture and weapons.

Among them are a gilded bed featuring posts made of carved lion heads, a chariot and a goldhandled dagger experts say was forged from the iron of meteorites.

The walls of the chamber in which Tutankhamun lay were covered in gold, and his coffin was a three-piece sarcophagus — the innermost 110 kilos (240 pounds) of solid gold.

His funeral mask, now one of the world’s most instantly recognisable Egyptian artefacts, was of gold inlaid with lapis lazuli, and with eyes of obsidian and quartz.

The mask was damaged in 2014 when its beard, symbol of the pharaohs, was stuck back on with epoxy glue after being knocked off during maintenance in the Cairo Museum.

It took a team of German experts two months of restoration work to fix the botched repair.

The death of Tutankhamun, which ended the 18th dynasty under the period of Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom, is itself an enigma.

It has been blamed variously on a chariot accident, malaria or Kohler’s disease, which stops the flow of blood to the bones of the foot.

Some experts believe the resting place of the boy king contains two hidden rooms which may hold the tomb of legendary beauty queen Nefer-