Tut's Treasures: Hidden Secrets (2018) s01e02 Episode Script

1
NARRATOR:
Tutankhamun's spectacular treasures.
Now, for the first time
since they were discovered,
all 5,398 objects
are being brought together
in a new one-billion-dollar museum.
This will be the first time many of them
have been seen for a century.
(Salima gasps)
SALIMA: Look at the horse!
Look at the horse! Look at the horse!
NARRATOR: Scientists have been using
the latest imaging and forensic technology
to unlock long-buried mysteries
to reveal the man behind the mask.
ECKMANN:
So many tiny details are visible again.
NARRATOR: And one treasure has caused more
speculation over the years than any other:
Tutankhamun's death mask.
DR. NAUNTON:
Some scholars have begun to suggest
that this may not belong to him at all.
NARRATOR: Now, who the mask was actually
made for may no longer be a mystery.
♪
♪
NARRATOR:
The Valley of the Kings
the sacred burial ground
of ancient Egypt's pharaohs.
For centuries, archaeologists
have explored these tombs,
but each one they entered was stripped
bare by grave robbers in search of gold
every tomb, except one.
(men shouting indistinctly)
On November 26th, 1922,
archaeologist Howard Carter
broke into that long-forgotten tomb
to make the greatest
archaeological discovery of all time.
He found the breathtaking
treasures of Tutankhamun.
Ever since, the world has marveled
at the royal splendor
of this young king's tomb.
And the most famous treasure
of all is the death mask.
SALIMA:
Tutankhamun's mask is an icon,
and I think part of it is
because it is made of solid gold
and a lot of people get wowed by that
as well as by the beauty
of the craftsmanship
and also by the elegance
and the expression of the face.
NARRATOR:
Crafted from 22 pounds of gold,
this priceless object
is known throughout the world.
But speculation has always swirled
around this 3,000-year-old treasure
with some experts claiming the mask
may never have been made for Tutankhamun.
Now the opening of a major new museum
offers Egyptologists
a unique opportunity to assess everything
from the tomb as never before,
and the world-famous death mask
has undergone
the most intensive
forensic examination ever.
It will answer once and for all if this is
the mask of Tutankhamun.
The Cairo Museum has been the home
of the death mask
ever since it was discovered
a century ago.
MUSEUM ASSISTANT:
Let's see how to open
NARRATOR: And to see how the mask was
documented when it was first discovered,
Egyptologist Chris Naunton
is stepping back in time.
DR. NAUNTON: Wow.
NARRATOR: Hidden in the bowels
of the museum is a 100-year-old book,
that details every single object found
in Tutankhamun's tomb.
It's Howard Carter's
original excavation log.
DR. NAUNTON:
Huh. Wow. This is it.
- This is the beginning of the record.
- ASSISTANT: Yeah.
DR. NAUNTON: So this is
the first thing that he recorded.
- "Shrine, outermost." 6064.
- ASSISTANT: Yeah.
- DR. NAUNTON: Can I, can I turn the page?
- ASSISTANT: Okay.
NARRATOR: These pages,
barely turned for a century, reveal
that over 5,000 objects were taken
from the tomb,
but only a third
have ever been seen in public.
DR. NAUNTON: That's the death mask.
What does he say?
"Mask of mummy, beard and necklace."
- ASSISTANT (off screen): Yes.
- DR. NAUNTON: Wow, there it is.
The most famous archaeological object
from the ancient world:
"Mask of mummy." 60672.
NARRATOR:
And now, decades after its discovery,
the mask is about to start
a new chapter in life.
(siren blaring)
In a high-security operation,
the entire contents of Tutankhamun's tomb
are heading to a brand-new home.
Fifteen years in the making
and at a cost of one billion dollars,
the massive Grand Egyptian Museum
is rising up in the desert outside Cairo.
The huge array of items arriving,
show how much
this young pharaoh took to the grave
when he died at the age of 19.
SALIMA: Ideally, once you die,
you go and live forever,
and therefore you need everything
that you needed in this life.
And if you're a king,
you had a lot of stuff.
It's fantastic!
This is a scepter,
which maybe he would have held
or maybe someone else
would have walked before him with.
NARRATOR: There's everything
from mummified food for the afterlife
SALIMA:
Ooh, nice.
NARRATOR:
to the childhood belongings of the boy
who became the head of a powerful empire
when he was only nine.
SALIMA (off screen): This is some sort
of a seat with a footstool.
- Little bottom of Tut. Aw.
- MAN: Yeah.
SALIMA:
Aw! Sweet.
He needed all of the stuff
he used in daily life,
but he also needed a lot of religious,
magical things
that would help him go
from this world to the next.
So this is why his tomb is
just exploding with objects.
NARRATOR: The most important of those
magical objects was the death mask.
This golden portrait, a clear likeness
of Tutankhamun, was vital.
It was how he would be recognized
in the afterlife.
As the thousands of burial goods,
from the sacred to the mundane,
are gathered together in the new museum,
there's a chance for new information
about all these objects to be uncovered.
SALIMA: Layers and layers and layers
of information are coming out,
not just because objects
are being examined in detail,
but also because new technologies
can be applied to them.
NARRATOR: Scientific advances beyond
the wildest dreams of Howard Carter,
are allowing the contents of the tomb
to be forensically examined,
some for the first time.
And what's become clearer,
is that Tutankhamun's massive royal burial
did not go according to plan.
DR. NAUNTON: Perhaps things were
not done exactly as they should have been.
Perhaps they were done in a hurry.
NARRATOR: The origin of some
of the most magnificent objects
in the tomb is in doubt.
And some have now even suggested
that the most famous
of all the pharaoh's treasures,
his death mask,
may not have originally
belonged to him.
ECKMANN: Was the mask created
for Tutankhamun or for someone else?
NARRATOR: Could it be true
that this iconic death mask
was never intended for Tutankhamun?
It's inlaid with thousands of fragments
of colored glass and semi-precious stones.
Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan
fills the eyebrows,
Red carnelian from India
sets off the garland,
and the eyes are formed
from Turkish obsidian.
According to ancient Egyptian burial law,
this whole mask had to be ready
in a startlingly short amount of time.
Little more than two months was allowed
from the moment of death
until a body was sealed in its tomb,
and that has raised
doubts about the mask.
DR. NAUNTON:
The priesthood and the craftsmen
who were involved in preparing
the burial equipment
would only have had 70 days,
and that's the length of time it takes
to prepare the body for burial,
in which to create material
like this death mask.
Now, some people would say
that 70 days is not long enough
to create an object as fine as this.
In which case, the only way it could have
ended up among the burial equipment
of Tutankhamun was
if it was already available,
perhaps having been
made for somebody else.
NARRATOR: Over recent years,
speculation has mounted
that the death mask originally belonged
to Tutankhamun's stepmother Nefertiti.
People have wondered if craftsmen,
short of time, could have rescued her mask
and replaced her face
with that of Tutankhamun.
At the new Grand Egyptian Museum,
the sheer number of objects
arriving in its storerooms seems
to add weight to this theory.
It was a huge task for the ancient
Egyptians to prepare a king's tomb.
DR. NAUNTON: It's just incredible
to think that these things are so old,
they're so fragile.
But, I mean, the detail
on this is absolutely exquisite.
If you look at the open work
in this model shrine,
with the detail of a bull,
it's intimidating to be
this close to it, almost.
NARRATOR:
The volumes are staggering.
Hundreds of arrows,
beds, sticks, even shoes.
DR. NAUNTON:
Ah, these are beautiful.
- CURATOR: Smalls, smallest ones we have.
- DR. NAUNTON: Yeah!
So these must have been sandals made
for Tutankhamun
- when he was a young child.
- CURATOR (off screen): Yes, yes.
NAUNTON (off screen): How many sandals
do we have all together?
How many pairs, do you know?
CURATOR: All we received
until now, it's about 30.
DR. NAUNTON: Thirty pairs already here,
and there's still more coming.
- CURATOR: Yes.
- DR. NAUNTON: That's amazing.
Many of these objects
have never come out of storage,
they've never seen the light of day.
And it's only now, therefore, that we can
really get a sense of the full extent,
um, of the treasures
that Tutankhamun was buried with.
And it's really incredible to think,
I mean, every single one these items is
an exquisite work of art in its own right.
NARRATOR: And all of these thousands
of objects had to be either found
or created from scratch in just two months
before being transported to the tomb.
♪
NARRATOR: Tutankhamun's burial site
lies 400 miles south
of Cairo's Grand Egyptian Museum,
in the Valley of the Kings.
Chris Naunton has come to these
desert hills to see
where all the treasures
from Tutankhamun's tomb
were first gathered over 3,000 years ago.
They lay here until the archaeologist
Howard Carter first discovered
the long, hidden entrance
to the young pharaoh's tomb.
DR. NAUNTON: Even though I must have
been here dozens of times now,
um, it's still a thrill to come down
that descending passageway every time.
And it's difficult not to try to imagine
what it must have been like
for Howard Carter coming into this tomb,
finding it absolutely chock-full
of this incredible assemblage
of material of the finest quality,
more or less exactly as it had been left
3,000 years ago.
(men shouting indistinctly)
NARRATOR: The tomb was so full,
it took Carter and his team ten years
to remove the mass of treasures and haul
them across the desert, back to Cairo.
But as the excavation progressed,
Carter was hampered
by the size of the site.
The burial chamber was so cramped,
the team could barely fit
around the gilded shrines.
It was soon clear this was an unusual tomb
for such a powerful ruler
of ancient Egypt.
DR. NAUNTON:
Difficult to escape the feeling
that all is not quite right here.
It's just not very big,
and it's just not very complicated,
and the design is really quite simple.
There's not very much wall space at all,
and what there is,
is only half-decorated.
It feels more here as though a space
has been hastily adapted
to receive the burial of a pharaoh.
NARRATOR: The fact that Tutankhamun's tomb
is so small and badly prepared
has long puzzled Egyptologists.
(horns honking)
And at the Grand Egyptian Museum,
there's evidence
that Tutankhamun's burial
fell short in other ways.
The latest shipment of objects
from the tomb has arrived.
It's a batch of ushabtis,
models of servants intended
to serve the pharaoh after death.
There were more than 400
of these small figures,
many of which have
never been displayed before.
Each one should look like Tutankhamun,
bearing the same face as his death mask.
SALIMA:
He's funny with the googly eyes.
NARRATOR: But they've raised questions
for Egyptologist Salima Ikram.
SALIMA: Idea is that they should all look
like Tutankhamun,
but you can clearly see
a lot of variety here.
So although the paint job's similar,
the faces are very different,
'cause that one's got a pointy nose,
that one's got a differently shaped mouth.
Some faces are more delicately formed
and slightly more feminine even than his,
others are a bit more robust,
so there is a question as to whether
some of them might have
been made for someone else.
NARRATOR: It seems the leader
of an ancient empire may have been buried
with objects never intended for him.
SALIMA: You do see reuse
in tomb material fairly frequently,
especially in the non-royal corpus,
but it seems a bit odd
to do this in a royal burial.
NARRATOR: The conservators
at the Grand Egyptian Museum
are now trying to establish how much
of Tutankhamun's burial treasure
originally belonged to someone else.
Existing estimates are staggering.
Over 1,000 items, a quarter of the
contents of the tomb, are secondhand.
SALIMA: At this point,
it's very difficult to be precise
about how many items might have been made
for someone else and he used,
because it's only now that we are looking
even more closely at these artifacts,
and so we are slowly coming
into the process of saying,
"Well, this might belong to someone else,
and this clearly belongs to someone else,"
so we really have to look at each object
individually and very carefully.
NARRATOR: It seems the tomb workers,
pressed for time, reused items
to boost Tutankhamun's
store of treasures for the afterlife.
That backs up evidence, already gathered,
of what seems like a botched burial.
♪
NARRATOR:
Away from Cairo,
at the Griffith Institute
in Oxford, England,
there are more clues
that shortcuts were taken
in putting together Tutankhamun's tomb.
Chris Naunton has come to study
the original notes Howard Carter made
as he first assessed
the king's burial chamber.
NAUNTON (off screen):
This absolutely incredible drawing,
which was made by Carter himself,
is a kind of a plan view of the assemblage
of shrines, sarcophagus and coffins
that were found
in the burial chamber in the tomb.
NARRATOR: Carter carefully noted
how Tutankhamun's body,
bearing his death mask,
was interred in three coffins,
placed one inside the other,
like Russian dolls.
The coffins were then encased
in a stone sarcophagus,
inside a set of gilded shrines.
In theory, they should have fit
perfectly inside one another,
but Carter found otherwise.
DR. NAUNTON: When he had removed
the coffins from inside the sarcophagus,
he began to notice
that something wasn't quite right.
And as he says here,
"The top edge of the feet of the lid
"had been chipped away in places.
"They had been too high to allow the lid
of the sarcophagus
to be placed on the sarcophagus."
It seems the coffin was
too big for the sarcophagus
and it wasn't possible
to place the lid down.
Carter was beginning to record
these anomalies and to recognize
that there was something
a little bit strange
about the way this had been put together.
NARRATOR: Tutankhamun,
the head of a powerful empire,
was given an undersized sarcophagus
that couldn't hold his outer coffin.
And the middle coffin raises
more questions.
Discrepancies on the coffin's
nameplate, or cartouche,
have intrigued Egyptologist Aidan Dodson.
He suggests Tutankhamun wasn't just
surrounded by secondhand possessions,
he was even buried
in someone else's coffin.
DR. DR. DODSON: First of all, the
middle coffin is heavily inlaid in glass,
completely unlike the other two, which are
basically a pure gold appearance.
Second, there's-- some of the inscriptions
have the cartouche of the king,
which is sunk a little bit too deep into
the surface than one would have expected.
It looks like the original cartouche
has been cut out and a new one inserted.
And the final thing is the face, which is
not the face of Tutankhamun at all.
The cheeks are much wider, and it's also
the jaw is rather squarer as well,
um, a much more sort of, slightly more
pugnacious looking individual.
NARRATOR:
It seems the second coffin,
one of the most important items
in the tomb,
may have been recycled.
It had someone else's face on it.
And this isn't a one-off.
Even the precious gold bands used to bind
Tutankhamun's mummified body,
shows signs of another name.
Chris Naunton has a rare opportunity
to see if he can identify who,
before these bands are
moved to the new museum.
DR. NAUNTON: I've never seen
the underside of this band before,
but what's really striking, straight away,
as soon as it's been turned over,
is that there are cartouches on this side,
which are not present on the other side.
Um, it's quite difficult to read
in this light
and, um, I'm looking
at the inscriptions side-on,
but I can see a scarab beetle
and three plural strokes,
and, I think, next to the scarab beetle
there is an ankh sign,
which is a kind of a loop and then
a little sort of cross underneath,
we sometimes know it as the key of life.
In which case this is the name
Ankh-kheperu-re,
which is one of the names used by
a pharaoh about whom we know very little,
but it's definitely not Tutankhamun.
NARRATOR: Yet again, one of Tutankhamun's
most personal burial goods
is taken from a previous pharaoh.
The evidence is coming together.
Tutankhamun was interred
in an undersized tomb,
and many of his other burial goods,
now being examined
at the Grand Egyptian Museum, were reused.
The case for the iconic death mask
being recycled is getting stronger.
Now experts are searching
for the final proof.
NARRATOR: Cairo, the home of Tutankhamun's
death mask since its discovery.
For a century, the mask has been drawing
admirers from around the world.
But recently speculation
about the true origins of the mask
has become increasingly intense.
DR. NAUNTON: In the last couple of years,
some scholars have begun to suggest
that actually this may not belong
to him at all,
or it may not originally
have been made for Tutankhamun,
and there are several
reasons for thinking this.
First of all, the gold that
was used to model the face,
and we're sure this is the face
of Tutankhamun,
is of a different caliber from the gold
that's used in the rest of the mask,
as if the face was modeled separately,
perhaps at a later time.
NARRATOR: The theory that the original
face of the mask was cut out and replaced
by a portrait of Tutankhamun
has gained popularity.
And Egyptologists have noticed other signs
that could show the mask is secondhand.
DR. NAUNTON: The cartouche,
which includes the hieroglyphic signs,
which spell out the name Tutankhamun
seems to have been altered,
as if perhaps originally
it read a different name,
a name that was not that of Tutankhamun.
NARRATOR: Queen Nefertiti is thought to be
the likely previous owner of the mask.
Yet all the theories
about the true origins of the mask
have remained no more than speculation,
until now.
In a recent groundbreaking development
leading conservator Christian Eckmann
gained the opportunity to study
this 3,000-year-old treasure.
It was the first time that permission
had been granted
to examine the mask in such depth.
ECKMANN: Being entrusted
with such a wonderful job
also means a great responsibility.
It's a unique chance to study
such an iconic object,
and of course the pressure you have
is not the pressure which is put
by others on you,
but your own pressure.
You want to achieve the best results,
and it's really a single
opportunity in lifetime.
NARRATOR: While Christian Eckmann's work
should definitively settle
the origin of the death mask,
researchers at the new museum
have been digging
into some of the other puzzles
from the tomb.
Even objects specifically made
for the pharaoh seem to have problems.
Museum director Tarek Tawfik
has been inspecting
one of Tutankhamun's gilded
ceremonial beds
that has recently arrived at the museum.
DR. TAWFIK: When working on it,
one has discovered
that there are
different signs on the bed.
These signs have started
a vivid discussion
between Egyptologists about
how these beds were assembled.
NARRATOR: It's believed the inscriptions
on the base of the cow bed
refer to the lion god, which suggests
that parts from two different beds
were mixed up by workers in the tomb.
DR. TAWFIK:
They had to deal with the situation
that the corridor leading to the tomb
of Tutankhamun was quite narrow.
So the pieces had to be disassembled
and then reassembled inside the tomb.
Should the beds
have been assembled incorrectly,
this would tell us that the people
were under time pressure.
This might have led to mistakes.
NARRATOR: It's further evidence the tomb
workers were battling against the clock.
But why does Tutankhamun's burial
seem so much more hurried
than that of other pharaohs'?
Away from the museum,
Chris Naunton wants to see
if Tutankhamun's body
can provide an answer.
The pharaoh's mummy,
wearing its golden death mask,
was first revealed when Howard Carter
opened the inner coffin.
It took him three years of painstaking
excavation to reach this point,
and he was shocked at what he found.
DR. NAUNTON: No Egyptian
should have been mummified like this,
let alone an Egyptian pharaoh.
It was quite normal for there to be
an incision on the torso,
which would have allowed
the removal of the internal organs,
which is a part of
the mummification process,
but in this case,
that incision is much too big
and it's in the wrong place as well.
And also most unusually of all, perhaps,
the heart, which wasn't one of the organs
that should have been removed,
it was essential that that remained
inside the body,
this had been removed in the case
of Tutankhamun's mummy.
So clearly, this was not
a standard mummification.
NARRATOR: The labs at the museum
are steadily filling
with more and more artifacts
from ancient Egypt.
Yet no other mummy in the collection
has been found without a heart.
It was seen as the center
of intelligence and emotion,
and essential to life after death.
Without his heart, Tutankhamun
would have been sent into eternity
unable to think or feel.
(men chatting indistinctly)
NARRATOR: Clues to why Tutankhamun
was buried without his heart
could be resting in the body
of the ancient nobleman Yuya.
SALIMA:
He's amazing.
(sniffles, sighs)
This is why some of us do Egyptology
because, I mean,
you actually get to see them
and know them in a much more
intimate and personal way,
and it is extraordinarily moving.
NARRATOR: Yuya was
the great-grandfather of Tutankhamun,
and his perfectly kept mummy is
in stark contrast to the young king.
SALIMA (off screen): You can see
how beautifully he's preserved,
and although his skin is darkened
by oils and resins,
it's nothing like the body of Tutankhamun,
which is glooped over
with masses of resin and oil,
but it is a very nice counterpoint
and comparison with Tutankhamun.
And now, Mr. Moaman, maybe we can see
how that evisceration cut.
MOAMAN:
Yes
NARRATOR:
Like most ancient Egyptian bodies,
Yuya has a slit
at the side of his abdomen.
SALIMA: There we go.
That's what we want to see.
This is the evisceration cut,
and from here,
the embalmer would put in his hand
and pull out the internal organs.
So this is a normal incision,
which is over the left flank.
But Tutankhamun had
a completely odd incision
that went straight
from the belly button out,
in a sort of diagonal,
which no one else has.
And so then his internal organs
were removed higgledy-piggledy,
possibly including the heart.
NARRATOR: Tutankhamun's
botched mummification has led
Egyptologists to speculate
where and how he died.
If he died suddenly,
away from home,
it could have taken weeks to bring
his body back to the Valley of the Kings.
SALIMA:
This could mean that he was mummified
somewhere away from the Nile Valley,
in an unexpected way,
because he didn't have
any experts with him
who really knew what they were doing.
NARRATOR: Because Tutankhamun
died young, at age 19,
it's likely preparations
had not been made for his burial.
And that meant there would have been
much less time than usual
to create his death mask and gather
together his thousands of burial goods.
The man in charge of where and how
the young king was buried
was his successor, the pharaoh Ay.
And his tomb, in the Valley of the Kings,
is in sharp contrast
to the burial site he chose
for Tutankhamun.
DR. NAUNTON: One thing
that strikes you straight away,
in contrast to the tomb of Tutankhamun,
is that, in all aspects, this tomb is
just grander, it's bigger.
Those passageways are wider.
It makes much more of,
sort of, a grand spectacle
of the sarcophagus in the center here.
This feels very much like the burial
chamber that would be fit for a pharaoh.
It's the right size,
the decorative elements are here,
the care and attention spent
on that decoration
by the painters is really obvious.
The scene of the pharaoh hunting
in the marshes is very striking
for its detail, and particularly
the beautiful way
in which the birds are painted.
NARRATOR: Tutankhamun's tomb
is half the size of Ay's,
much smaller than most other royal
burial sites in the Valley of the Kings.
DR. NAUNTON: It was absolutely standard
for pharaohs to begin construction
of their tombs, more or less,
as soon as they began their reign,
and so for Tutankhamun,
he would have had a tomb underway,
and he might well have had ideas
about what he would've wanted.
NARRATOR:
Ay's tomb has the grandeur
that Tutankhamun
would have expected.
So why was Tutankhamun's
burial site so small
and his funeral so lacking in care?
DR. NAUNTON: People have suggested
that this tomb
was originally being prepared
for Tutankhamun,
but it was usurped by Ay
as part of his power grab, if you like,
when there was a vacuum and a vacancy
on the throne at the end of Tut's reign.
♪
NARRATOR:
Tutankhamun died without heirs.
It seems likely
that a high-ranking official,
but not a member of the royal family,
took his chance to seize power.
He may have usurped
the dead king's tomb
and forced him
into an undersized burial site
with goods taken from previous pharaohs.
Now new scientific tests
can tell us if Ay inflicted
one final indignity on Tutankhamun.
Did he send the young pharaoh to his grave
in a borrowed death mask?
NARRATOR:
The Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The dark halls will soon be emptied
of their treasures
as the antiquities are transferred
to the new Grand Egyptian Museum.
And the last piece
from Tutankhamun's collection to be moved
will be the iconic death mask,
one of the most revered
objects in the world.
ECKMANN:
Face-to-face.
NARRATOR: Since 2015, leading conservator
Christian Eckmann has carried out
an intensive investigation of the mask.
ECKMANN:
Have you seen that?
Within the eye, left and right,
they have eight tiny veins,
which make the whole eye so lifelike.
It's the attention to details
I love so much.
NARRATOR: His privileged access is
allowing him to piece together
exactly how the mask was made
before it's moved to the new museum.
For the first time,
expert analysis can answer
the question that's been hanging
over the mask for years:
Was it made for Tutankhamun
or someone else?
Eckmann started by studying
the controversial nameplate, or cartouche.
ECKMANN (off screen): So we are looking
here at the royal cartouche
of the mask of Tutankhamun,
which is placed near the shoulder,
on the left side of the mask.
And, in fact, you see some suspicious
or unusual traces,
like the line here and this one here,
which cannot be interpreted so easily.
NARRATOR: It's been suggested these marks
show Tutankhamun's name was engraved
over the top of another name,
that of his stepmother Queen Nefertiti.
But Eckmann's research points
in a different direction.
ECKMANN: One has to understand
you cannot create a mask of this size
without connecting different gold sheets
together to the whole mask itself.
And the cartouche is running
over two parts of gold sheets,
which have been connected exactly
in this position or joined together.
And that is what you see here,
one of those seams.
NARRATOR: The supposedly reworked
cartouche is simply evidence
of parts of the mask
being joined together.
But there's something else that's puzzled
some Egyptologists for the last few years.
The color of the gold in the face is
different from the rest of the mask.
One theory that's gained traction is
the suggestion that the huge time pressure
caused by the young king's sudden death
meant the craftsmen had to cut corners,
so they inserted a portrait of Tutankhamun
into something previously made.
As part of his investigation, Christian
used a powerful X-ray, known as XRF,
to analyze the content of the gold.
He wanted to see if the various parts
of the mask came from different sources.
ECKMANN: We measured more than a hundred
dots or points all over the mask.
The result was clear:
They used many sheets
of the same gold composition
that also includes the face,
so it looks to me very unlikely
that the face could have been changed
in antiquity and replaced.
NARRATOR: Eckmann proved that every part
of the mask was made from the same gold.
That strongly suggests the entire mask was
made at the same time
but using different techniques to give
the gold a variety of colors.
And Eckmann found other evidence
that the mask is a one-off original:
clues that came from the stone and glass
inlays around the face.
ECKMANN: If the face would have been
cut out and replaced
after the mask has been finished already,
it could not have been soldered in again
without damaging or even destroying
the glass inlays nearby,
because they cannot stand
such high temperatures.
I personally think this mask was
for Tutankhamun.
It was designed for him
and it was used for him.
NARRATOR:
Eckmann's results seem to be definitive
and mark the end of years of controversy.
Tutankhamun's fabulous death mask was made
for him alone in just 70 days
an astonishing feat
for ancient Egyptian craftsmen.
ECKMANN: It is one of the most
beautiful portraits in the world.
And from the point of view of
a conservator studying technology,
it's really impressive to see
what they were able to do.
I would doubt that someone today
could create such a masterpiece,
and it's really important to note,
in such a short time.
NARRATOR: Tutankhamun was laid to rest
wearing a death mask made for him alone,
despite his rushed funeral
and less-than-royal tomb.
Now the mask will take center stage
at the Grand Egyptian Museum.
And a new, imposing mausoleum
to the young pharaoh will be created.
The mask and the treasures of his tomb
will ensure Tutankhamun remains known
throughout the world.
DR. TAWFIK: It's my privilege to work
so closely with these pieces
and to feel that we are coming so close
to three thousand and a half years
of history.
It's like touching Tutankhamun,
the touch that will keep it
for generations to come.
(man reciting Koran over PA)
NARRATOR: More than 3,000 years ago,
a young pharaoh was hurriedly buried
in a small tomb,
surrounded by borrowed goods,
in the hope that his memory
would soon be forgotten.
But in a final irony,
it was Tutankhamun's humble tomb
that allowed the treasures,
crowned by his golden death mask,
to lie unnoticed until their discovery
thousands of years later.
- DR. NAUNTON: Cigarette lighter.
- VENDOR: Yes.
DR. NAUNTON (off screen): That face, which
we know so well from the tomb of Tut,
is, is here everywhere,
little statues, it's on T-shirts,
it's on little jars, these silver plates,
everywhere you look.
NARRATOR:
And his golden death mask has made
Tutankhamun's face the best known
of any person from the ancient world.
DR. NAUNTON:
Okay. Wow, so that's a kind of--
VENDOR:
This one is a pictured one.
DR. NAUNTON: Yeah, okay. So it's kind of
Tutankhamun's death mask
on a sort of neoclassical column.
That's pretty crazy.
Every Egyptian wanted to be remembered,
they wanted their name to live on.
Maybe it was too much, for most of them,
to ask for their face to be remembered,
but in the case of King Tut,
this is an overwhelming success.
It's very beautifully done.
- Tutankhamun would be pleased about this.
- VENDOR: Yeah.
DR. NAUNTON: He'll be very pleased
about this one.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
Very good doing business with you
Thank you, you have a beautiful shop.
VENDOR:
Yes, thank you.
NARRATOR: The treasures of his tomb
catapulted the young pharaoh
into more fame than
he could ever have imagined.
Tutankhamun may have been
buried to be forgotten,
but instead, his memory is destined
to live forever.
Captioned by Point.360