Gold of Tutankhamun
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The pharaohs of ancient Egypt controlled some of the richest gold sources of the ancient world, in the Eastern Desert and in Nubia to the south. Gold financed temples, cities and armies, and it was also the metal of eternity: Egyptians believed the skin of the gods was made of gold, so a king was buried surrounded by it. No discovery shows this better than the tomb of Tutankhamun, the young king who ruled around 1332–1323 BC and died at about 18 or 19 years old.
The Valley of the Kings and a search that almost failed
Not far from ancient Thebes (modern Luxor) lies the Valley of the Kings, where the rulers of the New Kingdom were buried. By the early 20th century most experts believed the valley had been fully explored and that every tomb had been robbed in antiquity. The British archaeologist Howard Carter disagreed. Funded by Lord Carnarvon, he searched the valley for several seasons with almost nothing to show for it.
November 1922: "wonderful things"
In November 1922 Carter's team found a step cut into the rock, then a staircase leading down to a sealed doorway. Behind it lay tomb KV62 — the tomb of Tutankhamun. When Carter first looked inside by candlelight and was asked whether he could see anything, he famously replied: "Yes, wonderful things."
The first room, the Antechamber, was crowded with gilded objects: dismantled chariots, ritual couches in the form of animals, chests, statues and the famous golden throne, whose back shows the king and his queen in a scene inlaid with gold, silver and coloured glass and stone.
Shrines within shrines
The burial chamber, opened in February 1923, revealed an extraordinary structure. Four gilded wooden shrines nested one inside another almost filled the room. Inside them stood a quartzite sarcophagus, and inside the sarcophagus were three coffins shaped like the king himself. The outer two are made of gilded wood. The innermost coffin is made of solid gold and weighs around 110 kilograms — one of the largest single gold objects to survive from antiquity.
The golden mask
Inside the third coffin lay the mummy of the young pharaoh, wearing the funerary mask that has become the symbol of ancient Egypt. The mask is made of gold, weighs about 10 kilograms and is inlaid with lapis lazuli, quartz, obsidian, carnelian and coloured glass. It shows the king wearing the striped nemes headdress, with the vulture and cobra — the protective goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt — on his brow.
Among the wrappings of the mummy, archaeologists found more than 140 objects: amulets, collars, bracelets, rings and two daggers — one with a blade of gold and one with a blade of iron that later research showed was made from meteoritic iron.
The Treasury
Beyond the burial chamber lay a smaller room known as the Treasury. It was guarded by a statue of the jackal god Anubis and held a gilded canopic shrine containing the king's internal organs, as well as chests of jewelry, model boats and dozens of gilded statuettes of the king and of the gods.
Why this tomb is unique
Most royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings were plundered in antiquity. Tutankhamun's tomb was also entered by robbers soon after the burial, but it was resealed and later covered by debris from other construction, which hid it for more than 3,000 years. Carter's team catalogued over 5,000 objects, a task that took about ten years.
Today the treasures belong to Egypt and are displayed in Cairo, where the new Grand Egyptian Museum was built to present the full collection together for the first time.
What the gold of Tutankhamun tells us
The tomb shows how central gold was to Egyptian beliefs about kingship and the afterlife. Gold does not tarnish or corrode, which is why the coffins, mask and jewelry look almost new after more than three millennia. That same durability is the reason gold has been valued as a store of wealth across so many civilisations.
Read also the article:
The golden throne of Tutankhamun
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