<p>A scientific team conducts conservation work on Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in 2016.</p>

A scientific team conducts conservation work on Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in 2016.

Photograph courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust

New ‘curses’ emerge from Tut’s history-making tomb study

From microbial 'freckles' to sticky dust, conservators have solved some problems in the pharaoh's 3,300-year-old funerary monument, but raised new concerns in the process.

When Howard Carter unsealed the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, he set off a series of discoveries that would capture the imagination of the world and set off an enduring love affair with the brightly painted 3,300-year-old burial chamber of the boy king and his golden treasures. Almost a century later, a team of scientists has now completed the most significant scrutiny of the tomb to date: a decade-long project of painstaking study and conservation that has solved some mysteries but also raised new questions about the future of one of the world’s most famous ancient monuments.

A symposium in Luxor this week details the overall results of the project, undertaken jointly by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and

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