2025 Poster Session

One of the current concerns in the conservation center of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM.CC) is the transportation, investigation, and conservation of Tutankhamun’s collection to prepare it for display at the new museum. During the excavation of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, Howard Carter mentioned that the tomb had been robbed at least twice and some objects were destroyed to many pieces by the robbers. The boxes and chests were among the objects ransacked at the time of the thefts.

This paper presents the role of conservation along with the archaeological data and scientific investigation in rediscovering and assembling a royal vaulted painted wooden box from King Tutankhamun’s collection after more than 87 years of keeping the pieces of the studied box separately in different Egyptian museums.

After surveying the wooden boxes of Tutankhamun in the Grand Egyptian Museum, Cairo Museum, and Luxor storerooms to gather more information on these boxes as a first step in our study, the second step included utilizing 2D and 3D softwares for documenting and studying woodworking techniques; optical microscopy was used for identification of wood species. In the third step of our work, hand-held X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) were applied to identify the chemical compositions of the materials used in the painted layers.

Based on the results of the collaborative approach, we succeeded in the assembly of the debris of the broken box (Carter no. k1-Other No. 116) in Luxor storerooms and the two parts (a piece of vaulted lid and a central rail inscribed with the names of Akhenaton and Smenkh-ka-re) in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which, most surprisingly, revealed that the separated pieces were originally complete a vaulted wooden box, as well as an added flat lid, belongs to another wooden box from Tutankhamun's collection.

Protocols and decision-making procedures during the collaboration of conservators, curators, and scientists were effective not only in assembling the separated pieces, which, most surprisingly, rediscovered a new vaulted wooden box but also in its display method in the new museum.