René O'Deay gBlog

Yesterday morning I cried. I didn't know why until I checked my forum on Glyphdoctors.com.

News | Africa - Reuters.com: "LUXOR, Egypt (Reuters) - Egypt put the mummy of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun on display in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings on Sunday, giving visitors their first chance to see the face of a ruler who died more than 3,000 years ago. In the dimly lit burial chamber workmen removed the gilded lid of Tutankhamun's mummy case and then hoisted the padded box containing the mummy out of the stone sarcophagus where it has lain for most of the time since Tutankhamun's early death. They then moved it to a climate-controlled acrylic glass showcase in the tomb's antechamber and sealed the cover. His wizened face is visible at one end, a white linen cloth covers his body and his blackened feet protrude at the other end. The mummy's face has high cheekbones and cracked and blackened skin with an intact nose."

Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian government's chief archaeologist and a passionate promoter of ancient Egypt, supervised the operation, broadcast live on some television channels.

"The face of Tutankhamun is different from the face of any king at the Cairo Museum," Hawass told reporters.

"He has these beautiful buck teeth and ... the tourists will see a little bit of a smile on the face of the golden boy," he added. "This will ... make the golden boy live forever."

The mummy will be visible to the general public from Monday.

First reactions from tourists were mixed.

Sergei Gostev, a Russian who said he based his opinion on his Christian beliefs, opposed the display. "I think any corpse of a body, even a mummy, should stay in its original place. It should not be a subject of a show," he told Reuters.

Although the artefacts have toured the world, the mummified body has been examined in detail only a handful of times.

Until Sunday, Tutankhamun's mummy had rested in a gilded coffin inside the stone sarcophagus inside the tomb.

But Hawass said humidity caused by the breathing of thousands of visitors a day threatened to further damage the mummy, which has deteriorated over the years.

Here's some of the photos of the operation from Fox News:



They take Tut out of his beautiful gold-covered coffin and his sarcophagus.



And put him in a plain wooden box under glass, with his bare head and feet exposed.

No beaded skull cap nor the golden headband. What did they do with them? Did they remove them for the xrays or the Cat scan?

And what about the gold covered coffin? Where is that?

And Hawass promised to open the last remaining offerings left this King who has brought economically untold millions, perhaps billions, to Egypt since his tomb was discovered and stripped in 1922.

He'll undoubtedly remove those too, "for safe-keeping'.

René O'Deay