King Tut's Beard Broken Off, Wrongly Glued Back on

by Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News

Inappropriate epoxy glue is now holding together the long, narrow, blue and gold beard on the famous mask of King Tutankhamun, according a report in the Arabic news site Al Araby Al Jadeed.
Braided like a pigtail with the end jutting forward, the beard was reportedly detached from the over 3,300-year-old mask during a cleaning incident last October at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where the artifact is one of the top attractions.
Weird Facts About King Tut and His Mummy
A museum employee, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals, told Al Araby Al Jadeed that the beard was unintentionally severed from the chin during ordinary dusting.
Three of the museum’s conservators confirmed the incident to the Associated Press, although they gave different accounts as to whether the beard was knocked off during cleaning or was removed because it was loose.
They all agreed that the beard was glued back on improperly.
Rather than following the regular procedures reporting the damage to the Ministry of Antiquities and send the priceless artifact to the restoration lab, someone opted for a DIY procedure, Al Araby Al Jadeed wrote.
Tut’s Funeral: Burying the Boy King
The beard was fixed with quick drying epoxy that cannot unstuck given its very high adhesive property. Indeed, the material is used for attaching on metal or stone.
Moreover, the glue was used abundantly, causing it to dramatically flow along the beard and chin.
According to the Arabic news site, which has published a picture to show “the presence of a foreign substance between the mask and chin,” it was then decided to remove the residue adhesive with a spatula, only doing more damaging as scratches are now visible.
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The incident, according to the news site, is the reason why the room housing the priceless golden mask is dimmer than the rest of the museum.
“Instructions were given in order to avoid showing the face and the damage in the chin area,” Al Araby Al Jadeed wrote.
The Egyptian museum has not yet confirmed the reports.
Image: King Tut mask at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo before the alleged incident. Credit: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen/Wikimedia Commons.

Richard III visitor centre in Leicester opens its doors to the public

Visitors to the £4.5m centre will see a replica skeleton of the Plantagenet king and the grave that held his body for 500 years

Maev Kennedy

The Richard III Visitor Centre will showcase the king's life, reign and gruesome death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Photograph: Christian Dezelu

In the heart of Leicester, visitors will be invited to gaze down through a pane of glass into a rough oblong hole in the ground: the grave that for more than 500 years held the body of the last Plantagenet king, Richard III.
An outline of the skeleton with the twisted spine is projected on to the red-brown earth. The pit also holds the yellow pegs used by the excavators from the University of Leicester archaeology service in August 2012 to mark a discovery that would make front-page news around the world.
The city council now hopes the crowds who followed the story so avidly will come to its £4.5m visitor centre, opening to the public on Saturday. The attraction tells the tale of Richard's life, brief reign and death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, and the discovery of his hastily dug and slightly too small grave in what had been the choir of the long-vanished Greyfriars church.
The sound of diggers, hammers, and chisels clatters in the narrow surrounding streets: new gardens are being created, flowers planted, expensive stone paving laid, benches and explanatory plaques installed. Next spring, when Richard is reburied in a handsome new tomb in the cathedral just 100 yards away and a display on medieval Leicester is installed in the Guildhall, the transformation of the most historic quarter of the city will be complete.
"We're expecting visitors from all over the world, but I certainly think everyone in Leicester will want to come, and I hope it will become very much part of the fabric of the city, so that when any friends or relatives visit, the first thing people will want to do is bring them here," said Iain Gordon, director of the centre.
Even before the press conference in February last year when, after months of tests, the university announced "beyond reasonable doubt" that they had found Richard, the council had taken a leap of faith and bought the freehold of a Victorian school building that had stood empty and decaying across the road from the cathedral since 2008.
When the archaeologists dug up broken stones with Gothic carving there, they first thought they'd found part of a great medieval window that would once have lit the king's grave. In fact, they came from a demolished school outbuilding.
Although generations of children had played unknowingly over the ruins of the church, the grave lay just on the other side of their playground wall, under the tarmac of a council-owned car park. That has now been joined to the former school and the grave sheltered in a stone and glass building.
As well as replicas of the skeleton and the skull, Richard's head has been recreated as it is believed to have looked in life. The displays include the union jack-patterned Hunter wellies worn at the site by Philippa Langley, the author and member of the Richard III Society, which raised the money and persuaded the university archaeologists to take on the search.
Nearby there are the hard hat and high-vis jacket worn by Mathew Morris when he found Richard's bones in the first hour of the first day – and buried them again for later study, assuming they would prove to be of no particular interest.
There is also a photograph of Richard Buckley, the excavation project director, eating a hard-hat-shaped biscuit. When he launched the project, Buckley was so convinced they'd find nothing except a few traces of the lost friary – if they were lucky – that he promised to eat his hat if they found the king. His team baked him a more palatable alternative.
The displays also explain a story that casts a dark shadow over Richard's reign: how his brother's young sons, whom he declared illegitimate in order to claim the crown, vanished in the Tower of London. However, it leaves open the question of whether they were actually killed on Richard's orders.
"Did Richard kill the little princes in the Tower? My position is that I sit firmly on the fence," Buckley said. "What I will say is that Richard was probably no better and no worse than any other late medieval king."
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jul/22/richard-iii-visitor-centre-leicester

Great North Museum needs to raise £7,000 to safeguard Lindisfarne Hoard

Collection of gold and silver coins dating from 1560s was found in the same building as those found 50 years ago on Northumberland island

A dirty old jug with some glistening contents: the Lindsifarne Hoard.

 

n the 1560s Lindisfarne, a tidal island off the Northumberland coast near Berwick, was something of an armed camp close to the front line of the defence against Scotland. After Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, stones from Lindisfarne Priory were used to build a small castle and other fortifications for the harbour.

So the garrison seems an unlikely place for not one but two of Britain's greatest treasure discoveries. Perhaps an officer stationed on Lindisfarne was careless, forgetful or unlucky, as two small hoards of coins dating from shortly after the castle was built in 1550 have been found near a watercourse by the same house.
The first collection came to light in 1962, and consists of 50 silver 16th-century English and Scottish coins. It now belongs to the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle, and is housed in the Great North Museum.
In 2002, while working underpinning foundations to the same house, local builder Rob Mason unearthed a dirty old jug. He kept it in his garage for several years before deciding to clean it out, when he discovered that it was filled with 10 gold and seven silver coins. The collection was taken to Dr Rob Collins, a Portable Antiquities Scheme expert in the North East who said:

This is a remarkable discovery and in light of the recent success of the return of the Lindisfarne Gospels to the region it would be very sad to see this treasure leave the North East.

The hoard has been declared Treasure Trove, and the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle has now launched an appeal to keep the latest Lindisfarne Hoard with its predecessor at the Great North Museum. The total price of the hoard is £30,900, with £7,000 needed from public donations.

Medici gold: the papal escudo of Clement VII.

The 17 coins date from around 1430 to 1562. English coins from the reigns of Henry VI and all the Tudor monarchs are in the find. It is the foreign coins, however, which make the collection particularly important. They include two gold écus from François I of France, a gold scudo from Pope Clement VII, a gold crown from the Emperor Charles V and a silver thaler (the predecessor of the dollar) from the Electorate of Saxony.
The gold papal scudo is especially rare: it was struck for Clement VII, a nephew of Lorenzo il magnifico de Medici, at around the time he was refusing to allow Henry VIII to divorce Catherine of Aragon.
Inflation has done little to erode or enhance the value of the hoard. According to Dr Collins, back in 1562, it would have had roughly the purchasing power of £30,000 today:

Some of the coins have actually gone down in purchasing power, but the Clement VII escudo, which is one of only three I'm aware of in the world, has enormous rarity value.

Collins believes the two hoards probably belonged to the same officer, with the earlier hoard acting as a domestic savings fund, and the more recent one as his international account. Both hoards were found in similar stoneware jugs made in the Rhineland. The Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle's chair, Lindsay Allason-Jones, said:

As Lindisfarne in the Elizabethan period was used largely as a military garrison, with the priory used as a supply base, it is possible that the original owner of the two hoards was a military officer who had seen service on the continent

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/the-northerner/2014/jun/13/lindisfarne-hoard-gold-silver-coins-great-north-museum

The Wizard of Notts Recommends: Saint Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art Glasgow

 

 

Saint Mungo is the commonly used name for Saint Kentigern (also known as Kentigernus (Latin) or Cyndeyrn Garthwys (Welsh)). He was the late 6th century apostle of the Britonnic Kingdom of Strathclyde (now modern Scotland) and patron saint and founder of the city of Glasgow.

 

 

The award-winning St Mungo Museum, named after Glasgow's patron saint, is home to inspiring displays of artefacts and stunning works of art exploring the importance of religion in peoples’ lives across the world and across time.

Opening Hours

Monday: Closed
Tuesday: 10am - 5pm
Wednesday: 10am - 5pm
Thursday: 10am - 5pm
Friday: 11am - 5pm
Saturday: 10am - 5pm
Sunday: 11am - 5pm

St Mungo Museum
2 Castle Street, Glasgow G4 0RH
0141 276 1625
museums@glasgowlife.org.uk
Text Phone:  0141 276 1629
Fax: 0141 276 1626

http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/st-mungos/Pages/default.aspx