19/05/2024
Tutankhamun: One hundred years since the holiest of all pharaonic discoveries
The story goes: The little boy was standing with his donkey, on which he carried water from the Nile to his family, the sons of Abd al-Rasul, who were working on excavations in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor at the beginning of the last century, when he discovered that water was dripping from the jars he was carrying. He decided to reconnect them, and when one of them put them down, the jars were lying on the ground and they hit something solid with his small axe, and it turned out to be a step.
The boy immediately informed the British Howard Carter, who had almost given up looking for Tutankhamun's tomb for five long years, threatening to stop funding his expedition.
Carter immediately went to the site of the stairs and discovered 16 steps leading to a cemetery. As Carter laid his head in a niche overlooking the cemetery from inside on November 4, 1922, he said, "It is the day of all days."
Carter and his team made history with the greatest discoveries of all time as they made their way into the tomb through quantities of untouched gold treasure never before seen by any king in the world.
At the door of the burial chamber stood two life-sized wooden statues of King Tutankhamun guarding the room, and inside was the royal tomb of the young King Tutankhamun, the most sacred discovery of all time.
The Golden Mask
King Tut sat in four gilded burial coffins, wearing a gold death mask on his face. The ten-kilogram mask depicts the king as a god carrying a staff and a flail. The lazuli and precious stones have been created in an astonishing way in terms of the precision of the design and their magnificence, so much so that one would think that whoever refined it in this way used modern machinery and not the hands of the three thousand Egyptians of years ago or more.
Bassam Al-Shamaa, a member of the Egyptian Society for Historical Studies, says that the mask is part of the physical and symbolic religious funeral ritual associated with death, resurrection and at the same time physical protection of the king.
The mask is made of pure gold, reaches a height of 54 cm and contains more than nine kilograms of pure gold.
The mask of King Tut consists of two levels or layers of gold that were joined by hammering. It is engraved, polished and set with a number of precious stones.
The story of the dismemberment of the king's body
Dr. Zahi Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist, tells the story of the dismemberment of the king's body in his book "Tutankhamun". Hawass confirms that the first examination of the mummy took place a full three years after the discovery of the tomb, in 1925, and the main purpose was to try to remove the mummy from the coffin, after which the king's head appeared before them, painted with gold, hidden behind the golden mask and even attached to it, and the mummy was also attached to the coffin.
Carter preferred to remove the coffin from the cemetery and place it in the sunlight, believing that the "resin", a resinous substance used by the ancient Egyptians, could melt and separate the mummy from the coffin.
But it seems that the paraffin wax that the ancient embalmers poured on the linen cloths caused them to stick to the mummy, which led to the doctor Douglas Derry cutting the linen cloths and forcibly removing the mummy from the coffin.
Carter and his team cut off the head at the side of the neck and separated the skull from the mask with a hot knife. They separated the body parts from each other and reassembled them with resin. Carter did not mention in his memoirs or books that he had dismembered the mummy, but as a result of examining the mummy, this was discovered.
The relics of the Golden King still reveal secrets and increase the worldwide fascination with this king, whose biography traveled all over the world thanks to his funerary goods.
