King Tut's Beard Is Back, With Help From a Little Beeswax
The beard has twice been knocked off of Tut's iconic gold mask. Now a new, high-tech effort has reattached it.
CAIROA 9-week restoration of King Tutankhamun’s golden mask has been successfully completed and the artifact is now once again on display in Cairo's Egyptian Museum.
The mask's elongated beard snapped off while museum staff worked on the display in August 2014. An attempt to restore the royal beard with epoxy followed. The latest conservation efforts began in October 2015. The objective was not only to reattach the beard, but also to undertake a full-scale study of the mask using the museum archives as reference, which hasn’t been done before.
Concern over Tut's beard dates back to 1922, when Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered. “The study of the mask showed that its beard was detached and was not fixed back till 1946” says Christian
