Egypt fixing Tutankhamun mask after botched epoxy repair

[tencats]

King Tutankhamun's burial mask was damaged by a botched effort to reattach its beard after it had been knocked off during a cleaning at Cairo's Egyptian Museum. Epoxy glue was used to place the beard back onto the mask, but it damaged the artifact.

Egypt fixing Tutankhamun mask after botched epoxy repair
October 20, 2015 by By Brian Rohan

Restorers put their work on the famed golden burial mask of King Tutankhamun on display in Cairo on Tuesday, over a year after the beard was accidentally knocked off and hastily glued back on with epoxy.

A German-Egyptian team of experts showed off the mask in a laboratory in the Egyptian Museum, detailing plans for how the epoxy will be scraped off and the beard carefully removed before being reattached by a method to be determined by a joint scientific committee.

Christian Eckmann, the lead restoration specialist, said the work should take a month or two, depending on how long it takes to remove the beard, which will be attached after research into how the mask and beard attachment were originally made and joined.

"We have some uncertainties now, we don't know how deep the glue went inside the beard, and so we don't know how long it will take to remove the beard," he said on the sidelines of a news conference with Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty and Tarek Tawfik, director-general of the still-under-construction Grand Egyptian Museum near the pyramids.

http://phys.org/news/2015-10-egypt-tutankhamun-mask-botched-epoxy.html

[trotsky]

1. Same reconstruction artist?