c. 1323 BCE · Valley of the Kings, Thebes (Luxor), Egypt
The golden mask of Tutankhamun
Hammered from 11 kg of solid gold and inlaid with lapis lazuli, carnelian, and obsidian, the mask is the funerary likeness of a pharaoh who died at nineteen — and the known summit of Egyptian goldsmithing.
When Howard Carter reached Tutankhamun's near-intact tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1922, the world suddenly saw what Egyptian royal burial actually looked like. Unlike every other royal tomb, this one had not been emptied by robbers; the mummy lay nested in successive coffins, and on the face of the innermost rested this mask.
The mask portrays the pharaoh with the attributes of Osiris: a straight false beard, a striped nemes headdress, a cobra (uraeus) and vulture (nekhbet) at the brow. The features are idealised — what we see is not the slight, ailing teenager of the bones, but the divine form he is meant to become after death. Behind the object lies the belief that the soul will recognise and return to its body.
Tutankhamun was a politically minor pharaoh; what his tomb showed, by surviving intact, reshaped almost everything we know of ancient Egypt. The mask is now housed at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and remains the most reproduced object from the ancient world.
Location
Valley of the Kings, Thebes (Luxor), Egypt · © OpenStreetMap
Sources
- The Mask of Tutankhamun — Smarthistory — Smarthistory
- Tutankhamun: The Mask and Coffin — Griffith Institute, Oxford — University of Oxford