Tutankhamun's beard 'snapped off and stuck back on with the wrong glue'

Employees claim that the monarch’s famed gold facial hair was broken during a routine clean.

18:26 23 January 2015

The Egyptian Museum is currently investigating an incident whereby the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s famed gold facial hair was claimed to have been broken during a routine cleaning.

The investigation aims to figure out if the beard was snapped off by curators in Cairo last year and if they attempted to stick it back using the wrong glue.

A museum official said: “What happened is that one night they wanted to fix the lighting in the showcase, and when they did that they held the mask in the wrong way and broke the beard.”

The official added that the employees tried to cover up the error and crept in overnight to fix it. However, they used the wrong adhesive and have attached it incorrectly. For this reason, they had to sneak back into the museum in the early hours of the following day to have another go at it.

“The problem was that they tried to fix it in half an hour and it should have taken them days,” he added.

However, Chris Naunton, director of the Egypt Exploration Society, says of the apparent photographic evidence of the damaged artifact: “I’ve not heard of the beard being removed before – the death mask is incomparably important and valuable and would normally be handled with the utmost care.

“It does look like something happened there. I just couldn’t believe it when I saw it.

“It just looks too bad to believe.”