Found on the mummy
Howard Carter found Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in November 1922, but he reached the mummy only three years later. On 28 October 1925 the team opened the innermost of three nested coffins, made of solid gold and weighing about 110 kg. Inside lay the mummy, and over its head and shoulders, the mask. Tutankhamun had died around 1323 BCE, at about nineteen, after a reign of some ten years.
A funerary mask is a portrait that covered the face of the mummified body. If the body decayed, the mask still gave the dead person a recognisable, perfect face, so that their spirit could find them and the gods could recognise them. Ordinary people had masks of painted plaster and linen. A king had gold.
Why gold?
Gold does not tarnish or rust. To the Egyptians that made it the flesh of the gods, and the sun god Ra was said to have skin of gold. Covering the king’s face in it meant turning him into a god. The mask is 54 cm high and weighs 10.23 kg. It was made from two sheets of gold, 1.5 to 3 mm thick, hammered into shape and joined, then chased and polished. Analyses carried out in 2007 showed that the gold is about 23 carats, with a little copper to make it workable, and that the face and neck were finished with a paler alloy than the rest. It is a small difference, but it makes the skin glow differently from the headdress.
A face built from stones and glass
The king wears the nemes, the striped royal headcloth, with stripes of blue glass imitating lapis lazuli. On his brow rise two creatures: the vulture of Nekhbet, goddess of Upper Egypt, and the cobra of Wadjet, goddess of Lower Egypt. The cobra on the brow, the uraeus, was believed to spit fire at the king’s enemies. The eyebrows and the lines around the eyes are inlaid with lapis lazuli, brought from Afghanistan; the whites of the eyes are quartz, the pupils obsidian, with a touch of red in the corners. A broad collar of inlaid stones and glass ends in two falcon heads on the shoulders.
The face itself follows the conventions of Egyptian art: calm, symmetrical, young, staring straight ahead. It is a likeness of Tutankhamun, but an idealised one, the king as he wished to be seen for eternity.
A spell on the back
Turn the mask round and you find ten vertical lines and two horizontal lines of hieroglyphs engraved on the shoulders and back. They are chapter 151b of the Book of the Dead, a collection of spells to protect the dead in the afterlife. The text addresses the mask itself and assigns each part of the face to a god: the right eye to the night boat of the sun, the left to the day boat, the eyebrows to the Ennead, the forehead to Anubis. In practice the spell turns a portrait into a shield, with a god guarding each feature.
Made for someone else?
The earlobes of the mask are pierced, and when it was found the holes were covered with small gold discs. Pierced ears are common on images of queens and children, less so on adult kings. In 2015 the British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves argued that the mask had first been made for Neferneferuaten, a mysterious ruler who reigned just before Tutankhamun and may have been Nefertiti, and that the king’s name was engraved over another name in the cartouches. It is a hypothesis, not a consensus: other scholars see no trace of an earlier name and think the face was made for Tutankhamun from the start. Many objects in the tomb were certainly reused from earlier burials, which is why the question stays open.
The broken beard
The long braided beard, a symbol of the god Osiris, is a separate piece weighing about 2.5 kg, fixed into the chin by a tube. In August 2014, during work on the display case at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, it came off, and staff hastily glued it back with epoxy resin, leaving a visible line. In 2015 a German-Egyptian team removed the epoxy with wooden tools and reattached the beard with beeswax, a material the ancient Egyptians used themselves. The mask returned to display in December 2015.
Where to see it
For almost a century the mask was the star of the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square in Cairo. In 2025 it moved, with the rest of the tomb’s treasures, to the Grand Egyptian Museum near the pyramids of Giza, which opened its Tutankhamun galleries that year. It is shown in its own room, in a reinforced case. Check opening times and tickets with the museum before you go.
Sources
- Griffith Institute, University of Oxford, “Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation” (Carter’s notes and Burton’s photographs).
- N. Reeves, “Tutankhamun’s Mask Reconsidered”, Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar 19 (2015).
- National Geographic, “King Tut’s Beard Is Back, With Help From a Little Beeswax” (2015).
- T. G. H. James, Tutankhamun (2000).
- Grand Egyptian Museum, “The golden mask of Tutankhamun”.
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