A spectacularly bad restoration job has irreparably damaged King Tut's beard at Cairo's top museum, leading to a ministerial investigation.
One of the world's most precious ancient treasures, Tutankhamun's blue-and-gold funerary mask, was scratched and stained by five members of the Egyptian Museum's curatorial staff who tried an amateurish repair job using household epoxy glue.
The incident began when a caretaker noticed that a light bulb had blown in the 3,300-year-old mask's display case, according to staff who spoke on condition of anonymity.
As the glass box was removed last August, the boy Pharaoh's long, braided beard came loose.
Five of the museum's conservators were dispatched to repair the artefact over night, and when that didn't work, they tried again in front of tourists.
King Tutankhamun's death mask before the botched restoration (Credit: Wikimedia)
However, they botched the job, squirting on too much glue.
“The mask should have been taken to the conservation lab but they were in a rush to get it displayed quickly again and used this quick drying, irreversible material,” a curator told The Telegraph.
Images of the damaged death mask, which once adorned the 18th Dynasty King's mummy, inside his sarcophagus, have been circulating on the internet to the horror of experts around the world.
“What happened is that one night they wanted to fix the lighting in the showcase, and when they did that they held the mask in the wrong way and broke the beard,” one museum official said, according to The Guardian. “The problem was that they tried to fix it in half an hour and it should have taken them days.”
They then compounded the error by trying to chisel off the excess glue with a spatula.
The God King now sports a translucent yellow line of dried glue between his chin and his beard, which is crooked. The gold patina is also scratched.
"The five people assigned to reattach the beard clearly lacked experience," said Dr Abdel-Hamid Al Kafafi, a member of the team from the Antiquities Ministry assigned to investigate the incident, according to The Times.
"We have taken samples of the glue to know what exactly was used and if it is repairable."
However, Mahmoud el-Halwagy, the director of the museum, denied the reports, insisting that the death mask, his institution's prize possession, was "in a good condition of preservation," and that no damage had occurred since he took over last October.
He and Elham Abdelrahman, the head of the conservation department, claimed that the adhesive was applied, with the approval of the ministry, to ensure that the beard did not become loose at a later date.
Epoxy is rarely used on valuable antiquities because it is difficult to remove.
The funerary mask is the most famous of the treasures discovered by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings.
It was the centre-piece of the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" exhibition which toured around the world from 1972 to 1981, attracting 1.6 million visitors to the British Museum in London and 8 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Egyptian Museum has been criticised for providing less than optimal conditions for its priceless collection.
The ministry has also come under fire, not least for the handling of the restoration of the 4,600-year-old Djoser at Saqqara pyramid last year.
Unesco wrote to the ministry last fall demanding a detailed technical explanation after Egyptian experts complained that the facade had been damaged.
