Displaying items by tag: Egyptian Museum

Egypt put the famed golden burial mask of King Tutankhamun back on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo on Wednesday evening after the relic was repaired following a botched attempt to reattach the mask's beard with epoxy.

In August 2014, the beard was accidentally knocked off during work on the relic's lighting, after which workers hastily tried to reattach it with epoxy causing damage to the priceless artifact and stirring uproar among archaeologists.

From October, Tutankhamun’s golden mask will be off display and his tomb closed to tourists. The boy king’s famous mask is being taken off display at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, to enable conservators to remove epoxy resin, applied to the mask in August 2014 as a way of re-securing its loose beard. Although the beard was not broken, as was widely reported at the time, and the epoxy has not discolored or harmed the mask, it is not the most suitable material for the job, and too much was applied, leaving dried traces visible to viewers.

New research by an Italian scholar has shown that a painting in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum known as the "Meidum Geese" may be a fake. Writing for our sister newspaper, "Il Giornale dell’Arte," the Egyptologist Francesco Tiradritti called the five-foot-long fragment of wall decoration “what the Mona Lisa is to Western art.” A facsimile is on view in the Egyptian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

According to the historical records of Egypt’s Antiquities Service, the work was discovered in 1871 at the tomb of prince Nefermaat and his wife Itet (also Atet) at Meidum, and dates to around 2575-2551 BC in the early fourth dynasty.

The blue and gold braided beard on the burial mask of famed pharaoh Tutankhamen was hastily glued back on with epoxy, damaging the relic after it was knocked during cleaning, conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo said Wednesday.

The museum 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. Tutankhamen’s mask, over 3,300 years old, and other contents of his tomb are its top exhibits.

An exhibition featuring artifacts discovered off the coast of Egypt is set to tour Europe. “Egypt’s Sunken Secrets” is organized by Franck Goddio, the founder of the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology, in association with Egypt’s Ministry of State for Antiquities. Artifacts have been selected from museums across the country, including 18 from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, while over 200 come from recent underwater explorations by Goddio’s team.

In a press release, Mamdouh el-Damaty, Egypt’ s head of antiquities, said that the exhibition will strengthen cultural ties between Egypt and the EU, encourage tourism to Egypt, and bring in €600,000 of funding for the ministry, as well as an additional €1 per ticket after the 100,000th visitor.

The closest comparison is Swiss cheese: holes in vast swaths of land where looters, armed with machine guns and bulldozers, take to ancient archaeological sites in search of international paydays. To the untrained eye, these holes, visible in satellite images, seem haphazard. But to experts, these deep pits, spanning acres of land, are the work of sophisticated traffickers.

It’s exactly the kind of looting that worries Mohamed Ibrahim Ali, Egypt’s minister of state for antiquities.

But Egyptian minister of antiquities denies reports of large-scale looting and damage

Work has started on the restoration of objects damaged by looters at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, according to Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian minister of antiquities.

Hawass, writing on his website on 8 February, said that up to 25 of the 70 objects broken at the museum are now being restored. Among the objects damaged when looters entered the museum on 28 January was a small statue of Akhenaten, which was the first object to be cleaned and restored.