Tutankhamun's mummy to Be Displayed for 1st Time

The mummy of King Tutankhamun will soon go on display for the first time, exposing the bare face of the boy king, Egyptian officials have announced. The mummy will be removed from its sarcophagus and placed in a climate-controlled glass case in the antechamber of the pharaoh's tomb in Luxor in November (see Egypt map).

"I am taking [the mummy] out to show it to the public for the first time," said Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The move is part of an effort to preserve the mummy, which has been in poor condition since it was first discovered, Hawass explained.

Archaeologist Howard Carter unearthed Tutankhamun's treasure-filled tomb in 1922, the first discovered with its riches so intact.

But Carter and his team partly destroyed the mummy in search of more treasures buried with the pharaoh, separating it into 18 sections, Hawass said.

Humidity and heat, much of it generated by the breath of the tomb's 5,000 daily visitors, have also taken a toll.

"Right now the mummy has no special protection from the humidity in the tomb," Hawass said. "The new case will be specially sealed to protect it from this sort of damage."

The pharaoh's remains will be partially rewrapped in linen with the face of the pharaoh left uncovered, according to Mansour Boraik, general supervisor of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Luxor.

Officials hope the display will increase the number of visitors and generate profit for the conservation of other Egyptian antiquities.

"The 'golden boy' has magic and mystery that bring people from all over the world," Hawass said.

(Hawass is a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence. National Geographic News is a division of the National Geographic Society.)

The mummy has been examined four times before, but it has never been seen by the public.

In 2005 Hawass opened the sarcophagus to perform a series of CT scans that allowed researchers to create a reproduction of the king's face.

(See photos of Tut's mummy and reconstructed face.)

"I was fascinated with his face," said Hawass, who noted the king's buck teeth are similar to those of the pharaoh's royal ancestors.

"Meeting King Tut face to face was very personal. … It was an important moment in my life."

Tutankhamun became pharaoh at the age of nine, ruling for only ten years in the 14th century B.C. before meeting an untimely death.

(Read: "King Tut Died From Broken Leg, Not Murder, Scientists Conclude" [December 1, 2006].)

Awakening the Curse

Exposing the mummy is likely to resurrect the myth of the pharaoh's curse, once believed to bring tragedy to those who disturb the tomb.

Most famously, Carter's sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, died shortly after entering the tomb from an infected mosquito bite.

Other tragedies were also blamed on the curse, and some experts have said ancient toxins lying in the tomb could have played a role.

"There is always mystery about King Tut, and it will never stop," Hawass said.

"Of course this will reawaken fears of the curse, as any new project involving the tomb or the mummy always does."

"I don't believe in the curse at all," he added. "But the gold, the intact tomb, the curse—all this history makes everybody fascinated by King Tut."

Egypt to put Tutankhamun mummy on display in tomb

EGYPT will put the mummy of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun on display next month inside his tomb in Luxor's Valley of the Kings, allowing visitors to see his face for the first time, Egypt's chief archaeologist said overnight.

Zahi Hawass, head of the High Council for Antiquities, said he would place the mummy in a climate-controlled glass showcase in the tomb and cover the body with linen. Tutankhamun's bare face would be visible.

"You will enter the tomb and see for the first time the face of Tutankhamun ... This is the first time in history that anyone will see the mummy (in public). This will continue the magic of Tutankhamun," Mr Hawass said.

Tutankhamun, who died on the cusp of adulthood, ruled Egypt between about 1361 and 1352 BC. The 1922 discovery of his intact tomb, whose treasures included a now famous gold funerary mask, stunned the archaeological community.

Although the artefacts from Tutankhamun's burial tomb have toured the world, the mummified body of the king has been examined only a handful of times in detail since the tomb was discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter.

Mr Hawass said Tutankhamun's mummy was currently resting in a sarcophagus inside the tomb covered by a gilded coffin, but that the humidity caused by the breathing of thousands of visitors threatened to damage it.

"I thought that this will help tourists and at the same time help preserving the mummy. I think a mummy like this, the golden boy, it is time that people should really see it," he said.

Tutankhamun came to the throne shortly after the death of Akhenaten, the maverick pharaoh who abandoned most of Egypt's old gods in favour of the Aten sun disc and brought in a new and more expressive style of art.

During Tutankhamun's reign, advocates of the old religion were regaining control of the country and turning their backs on Akhenaten's innovations.

Tutankhamun was buried along with many other pharaohs of the period in the Valley of the Kings near the modern town of Luxor.

Mr Hawass had not yet set a date to display the mummy, but said he expected it to be shortly before a mid-November exhibit on Tutankhamun in London that is to include the pharaoh's royal crown but not the gold mask, which is too delicate to travel.

Mr Hawass described Tutankhamun as having "buck teeth" and pictures of the mummy show a face with high cheekbones and blackened, cracked skin and an intact nose.

Mr Hawass was also planning to shortly open 16 jars from Tutankhamun's tomb that were rediscovered in a storage area in Luxor. The jars were originally found by Carter but were forgotten about over the years.

He said he expected the jars would contain food, grain, beer and wine, items the king would have been expected to need in his afterlife. The jars were part of caches of artefacts whose rediscovery was announced last month.

Mystery has surrounded Tutankhamun ever since 1922. Lord Carnarvon, Carter's sponsor and among the first to enter the tomb, died shortly afterward from an infected mosquito bite.

Newspapers at the time said Carter had unleashed a pharaonic curse that killed Carnarvon and others linked to the discovery.

Scientists have in the past suggested a disease lying dormant in the tomb may have killed the British aristocrat.

Second Life interesting things

Look what i found and bought! in Second Life. For those who don't recognize it: It's the throne of Tutankhamun.

Ancient Egyptian fruit hamper found in Tutankhamun's tomb

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, speaks about an exhibit of treasures of Tutankhamun (King Tut), and other Valley of the Kings tombs and ancient sites, in 2004. Eight baskets filled with fruits preserved for more than 3,000 years have been discovered by Egyptian archaeologists in Tutankhamun's tomb, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Monday.

Eight baskets filled with fruits preserved for more than 3,000 years have been discovered by Egyptian archaeologists in Tutankhamun's tomb, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Monday.

A team of Egyptian archaeologists, led by antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass, made the disovery in the Valley of the Kings in the ancient city of Thebes, the modern-day Luxor, in southern Egypt.

"The eight baskets contained large quantities of doum fruits, which have been well preserved," Hawass said in a statement.

The fruit baskets are each 50cm (nearly 20 inches) high, the antiquities department said.

The sweet orange-red fruit, also known as the gingerbread fruit, comes from the Doum Palm, a native of southern Egypt, and was traditionally offered at funerals.

Twenty pear-shaped containers, one metre (three feet) in height and bearing Tutankhamun's official seal were also discovered.

According to Hawass, the containers are probably full of provisions that were destined to travel with the pharaoh to the afterlife. They will be opened soon, he said.

The boy king's intact tomb caused an international sensation when it was discovered by Briton Howard Carter in 1922. More than 5,000 beautifully preserved objects -- including a chair with an intact wicker seat and a cosmetic jar which still contained animal fats and resins -- were found.

Tutankhamun still revealing secrets

Egypt's top antiquities official was down in the fabled tomb of Tutankhamun a few weeks ago - doing a television interview, of all things - when he noticed something curious he had never seen before.

In a back room closed to public view, Zahi Hawass spotted a cluster of reed boxes crammed with plaster fragments and limestone seals used to stamp hieroglyphs. Intrigued, the scholar took a closer look and saw that both were marked with a trio of icons - sun, scarab and basket - whose meaning he recognized instantly:

Neb-kheperu-re, the throne name of the boy pharaoh.

Eighty-five years after his tomb was discovered, and after his treasures have been ogled by millions of museumgoers, King Tut is still revealing surprises.

In addition to the seals, apparently left behind by the original excavators in the early 1920s, Egyptian workers recently found 20 sealed jars with the pharaoh's name in an old storage facility nearby. Neither group of items is part of the official Tut inventory at the Egyptian antiquities museum in Cairo, Hawass said in a phone interview.

On Thursday, he comes to Philadelphia to speak about these surprises and another: For the first time, Tut's mummified body will go on public display, protected in a climate-controlled case in his tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

The lecture will be a homecoming of sorts for Hawass, whose trip coincides with the waning days of the blockbuster Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute.

He got his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and lived in a one-bedroom apartment at 43d and Walnut Streets from 1980 to 1987. He said his studies here "changed my life," enabling him to serve his country.

The "new" seals and jars, meanwhile, will not be added to the exhibit, Hawass said. Though they are not the sort of gilded wonders that have drawn the museum crowds, they are of interest to archaeologists and historians, for whom much of the pharaoh's brief life remains a mystery.

Egyptologists were excited to hear of the rediscovered items.

"My God," David O'Connor, a professor of ancient Egyptian art at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, said upon hearing from a reporter about the finds.

O'Connor, former head of the Egyptian collection at Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, said he could easily see how the jars would have been forgotten. They were found a month ago when workers were transferring artifacts from a variety of past excavations to a modern storage facility.

Egypt is overflowing with antiquities, and the original finders of Tut's tomb may have thought some of the less spectacular objects were not worth taking to the Cairo museum, O'Connor said. More surprising is that the boxes of seals in the tomb itself were somehow overlooked, he said.

Penn's David Silverman, curator of the traveling Tut exhibit, said he had never seen the boxes in more than 30 visits to the tomb. That's probably because they were in the treasury room, which is located beyond the king's burial chamber and is typically not open even to scholars, he said.

Silverman said further analysis of the seals and plaster fragments was needed. But both he and James Allen, a Brown University Egyptologist, said they might well be the very seals that the ancients used to mark the king's name when they closed the tomb doors more than 3,300 years ago.

Silverman said he would be even more interested to learn the contents of the jars, which he speculated contain wine for the king to drink in the afterlife, or perhaps oils or unguents.

"It's nice that some of the mysteries remain," Silverman said, "because it spurs us on to do more research."

Hawass, who studied under Silverman at Penn, said he planned to open the jars after returning to his native Egypt following Thursday's lecture. The public talk will be 7 p.m. at Penn's Irvine Auditorium. Tickets are $15.

Opening the jars is just one of many projects on the agenda for Hawass, who in addition to his scholarly expertise has a flair for promotion. (Replicas of his trademark wide-brimmed hat are on sale for $45 at the Tut gift shop at the Franklin Institute, whose exhibit closes Sept. 30.)

He plans to continue DNA analysis of various mummies to sort out their tangled lineage. Scholars are not in agreement, for example, on the identity of Tut's father.

The antiquities chief also plans a search for the tomb of Ramses VIII, and he wants to further explore an unusual tunnel in the tomb of Sety I. Hawass said he had traveled more than 200 feet down the tunnel by rope recently, and he hopes a secret burial chamber lies at its end.

As he knows well, however, it is the treasures of Tutankhamun that have most captivated the public imagination.

Tut, who assumed the throne at age 8 or 9 and died about a decade later, is sometimes described as a minor pharaoh who became famous in modern times merely because so many of his treasures were recovered. But that undercuts his historical importance, said Penn's Silverman.

Under his leadership, Egypt's capital returned to the city of Thebes - now Luxor - and his subjects resumed official worship of their traditional gods after a brief period of monotheism.

Yet, more remains to be learned. Who were Tut's parents? What role did he play in actually running the kingdom?

Hawass vows to remain on the case.

"The mystery of Tutankhamun, in my opinion," said the antiquities minister, "will never end."

Origin of Mysterious Glass Found in King Tut's Tomb

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that researchers running simulations on the Cray supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories have re-created what could have happened 29 million years ago when an asteroid explosion turned Saharan sand into glass. The greenish natural glass, which can still be found scattered across remote stretches of the desert, was used by an artisan in ancient Egypt to carve a scarab that decorates one of the bejeweled breastplates buried in King Tutankhamen's tomb.

"Supercomputers now allow us to approach these problems as if we were conducting actual experiments," said Mark Boslough, the physicist at Sandia whose theory about the origins of Libyan Desert Glass sparked the research. "With this class of computer, we can run multiple simulations at such high resolution and fidelity that we can see phenomena that we wouldn't be able to predict from first principles. That means we can explore alternate possibilities as we go. It's more like doing iterative experimental science than theoretical science."

The Cray supercomputer at Sandia, nicknamed Red Storm, was developed jointly by Cray and Sandia, a part of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia upgraded Red Storm late last year to three times its original performance level, boosting its performance to more than 100 teraflops, or 100 trillion floating point operations per second. Red Storm is one of only three supercomputers in the world to exceed the 100 teraflops mark, according to the TOP500 results released last month.

"The Libyan Desert Glass study at Sandia is truly exciting research that crosses a number of scientific disciplines -- ranging from impact physics and geology to Egyptology," said Jan Silverman, senior vice president, corporate strategy and business development at Cray. "We are delighted to hear about how our highly scalable Cray XT(TM) supercomputer architecture allows iterative modeling techniques to find the most probable explanation. Using the computational power of our supercomputers we also see similar iterative techniques being used to optimize designs from automobiles to airplanes."

Clues To a Mystery

Until recently Earth scientists believed that natural glass can form by only two high-temperature processes. Volcanic glass, such as obsidian, can be produced when lava cools rapidly. Or, in rare cases, a glass known as tektite can form from the high pressures generated when an asteroid or comet directly impacts the earth. But compositional studies indicate that Libyan Desert Glass does not fit either of these two categories. Adding to the puzzle, scientists generally agree the Libyan glass was somehow formed by a collision with an object from space, but no one has ever been able to confirm an impact crater in the region.

Boslough found one clue to the glass mystery in the 1994 collision between the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Jupiter. That comet broke up into several pieces before it made contact with Jupiter's atmosphere, where the collisions caused fireballs that shot hundreds of miles above the planet. Boslough conjectured that if such an air burst were to occur above Earth, it might generate enough heat to fuse surface materials into glass.

Another clue was the Tunguska explosion that flattened a thousand square miles of forest across Siberia in 1908. Because there is no crater of sufficient size to have caused this event, it is generally believed that the Tunguska blast was the result of a meteoroid or comet fragment that exploded at an altitude of five to 10 kilometers (three to six miles) above the Earth's surface.

Boslough argues that a similar atmospheric explosion could have created fireballs large enough and hot enough to produce the Libyan Desert Glass. Such glass would have been forged in seconds, much like the glass that formed from super-heated sand at the Trinity site in New Mexico during the first atom bomb test in 1945. If the asteroid blast occurred above the Earth, there would be no evidence of a collision in the composition of the glass and no significant crater in the ground.

Re-creating the Blast

"What I focused on in the simulations was the explosion of the asteroid," said Boslough. "As the object entered the atmosphere it had tremendous kinetic energy. Much of that energy was converted to heat, creating a blast as hot as the surface of the sun over a large area. The fireball remained in contact with the Earth's surface for more than 20 seconds. At the same time, winds behind the blast reached a speed of several hundred meters per second. The glass formed from the rapid melting and quenching of the sandstone and alluvium on the ground."

Boslough and his colleagues at Sandia performed high-resolution hydrocode simulations on Red Storm using the CTH shock-physics code. They postulated a 120-meter diameter stony asteroid hitting the atmosphere at 20 kilometers per second and breaking up, touching off a blast equivalent to a 110 megaton bomb and producing intense heat and high-velocity winds.

According to the simulations, this explosion would have been more than sufficient to melt rocky material on the surface and then cool it quickly, the conditions necessary to form natural glass. The high winds would have accelerated the melting process by blowing away the boundary or "melt" layer that would otherwise insulate the stone from the heat.

Boslough and his group conducted a number of simulations to come up with their results.

"Multiple iterations are really important for gaining new insights," he said. "You can't plan out your whole experimental matrix and lock yourself in. When we vary the parameters, we can see new things. For example, we observed a large ring vortex during the explosion that acts as a 'lubricant' for the downward flow of mass and energy. No one had suggested that was possible before."

For more information about the Libyan Desert Glass study, go to http://www.sandia.gov/news/publications/technology/2006/0804/glass.html

Tutankhamun in London

That's worth a trip! But as said almost sold out!

The new exhibit of treasures from King Tutankhamun's tomb at London's O2 domed stadium is expected to be the country's largest art show in nearly 50 years.

It was announced Friday that advance reservations for the Egyptian exhibit, which opens in November and runs for nine months, has already reached 180,000, The Telegraph reported.

Organizers already are calling the advance bookings "quite staggering." They expressed confidence the show will smash the current record of 1.7 million visitors set by the first Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972.

The exhibit will feature 120 artifacts, 50 from the Egyptian king's 3,500-year-old tomb and the rest from other pharaohs graves.

The treasures will come to London once they finish a 2 1/2-year tour of the United States.

The organizers also said although booking officially opens Sept. 12, the first two months already are virtually sold out.

Wallpaper of Tutankamun's throne

This image i found makes a lovely wallpaper if you like it. This is a detail of the throne of Tutankamun found by Howard Carter in 1922. It's amazing in detail. If you just imagine craftsmen making this thing in that time! The image displays Tutankhamun with his half-sister Ankhesenamun. It is believed they share the same father but have different mothers. Ankhesenamun was coupled to Tutankhamun as they were still children. A practice which was quite common in antiquity. A way to keep the power in the family. Two mummified fetuses were found in the tomb as well. These are believed to be their unborn children's remains.

The throne remains one of the most beautiful items recovered from that tomb and it can be found in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

And it makes a nice new profile image for me as well!

King Tut exhibition 'racist'

Reconstruction of the face of Tutankamun. Image 2 Boy George. But looks more like he got wacked by molten chocolate or something.



You must be kidding me. Why do they always have to bring the racial issue up? Actually i think it's inappropriate as well. His short life was already dramatic enough. Can we please leave him in peace for a change? They talk about a reconstructed image. So let's put that and Boy Georges together. Then you tell me. They look alike????

"A travelling exhibition on King Tutankhamun drew about 50 protesters in Philadelphia who denounced the popular display as racist.

Molefi Asante, a professor of African-American studies at Temple University, led the demonstration on Sunday outside the Franklin Institute, claiming the exhibit has no mention of Africa and that it suggests the ancient Egyptian king was white.

Asante, who is also president of the Association of Kemetic Nubian Heritage, specifically pointed to a representation of Tut that "looks more like Boy George than the boy king".

A spokesperson for the Franklin Institute said images of Tut vary throughout the museum.

In response to the protest, the museum will hold a symposium this summer at which scholars and experts will discuss forensic evidence relating to King Tut.

Similar protests have been held in other US cities where the exhibit has appeared."

Source

'Cursed' ring found on beach could be part of treasure lost in early 20th century shipwreck

Rubbish this curse thing. But it makes always interesting reading.

"COULD this mysterious, 3,000-year-old ring be part of the lost - and cursed - treasure of Tutankhamun?
It's owner, Markas Dove of Kintbury, certainly believes so.
Since the ring was unearthed by a huge storm in 1987, Mr Dove has been offered a fortune for the ring, although bad luck has followed in its wake.
Mr Dove said: "My dad found the band with a metal detector after the hurricane of 1987 removed about 10 feet off the beach at the Isle of Wight.
"It was about 18 inches down beneath the shingle, among the bedrock."
Mr Dove revealed how everything went wrong for his father and mother following the discovery.
He said: "Mum developed cancer almost immediately and they lost their home. Dad developed severe depression and nothing seemed to go right for them."
The ring has since passed to Mr Dove, who took it to the British Museum to be authenticated.
Elisabeth O'Connell, the research curator at the British Museum's Egyptology department, said: "The inscription suggests it belonged to either Tutankhamun or one of his inner court.
"I would not like to try and put a figure on its value."
She added that an early-20th-century shipwreck of a vessel carrying Egyptian antiquities was the most likely explanation for the find.
Mr Dove said: "To be honest it has caused nothing but grief. I won't have it in the house now. It's in a friend's safe."

Source

Tutankhamun's golden mask made of Lego

How about this one?

A model of Tutankhamun's golden mask made entirely of Lego bricks is displayed during a preview of an upcoming exhibition at the Egyptian Museum. Article from Egyptology Blog.