King Tut's Leftover Bandages Yield New Clues

Discovery News ^ | Wednesday, May 19, 2010 | Rossella Lorenzi

[SunkenCiv]

King Tutankhamun's mummy was wrapped in custom-made bandages similar to modern first aid gauzes, an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals. Running in length from 4.70 meters to 39 cm (15.4 feet to 15.3 inches), the narrow bandages consist of 50 linen pieces especially woven for the boy king. For a century, the narrow linen bandages were contained in a rather overlooked cache of large ceramic jars at the museum's Department of Egyptian Art. The collection was recovered from the Valley of the Kings between 1907-08, more than a decade before Howard Carter discovered King Tut's treasure-packed tomb... "The linens on the actual mummy were so much decayed by excessive use of resins that the bandages on display at the museum are actually the best-preserved lot of Tutankhamun wrappings," Dorothea Arnold, curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan museum, told Discovery News. "When the floor was swept after wrapping the body of a king, naturally, there were quantities of pieces of linen, some of them bandages and some wider bits, gathered up," wrote Herbert E. Winlock (1884-1950), the Metropolitan's curator, in a 1941 account of the embalming material... Especially woven for King Tut, some of these expensive linens still evoke the presence of the embalmers, as they show fingerprints indicating that someone had wiped his hands on them.

[SunkenCiv]

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