That being said, I have to respectfully disagree with Bob Brier. In February 1979 I visited the Egyptian Museum, and saw both the room with the Tanite collection, and the galleries containing the part of Tutankhamen's treasures that wasn't on tour at the time. By themselves the treasures from Tanis were all right, but if you do what I did, and see them right after coming downstairs from what King Tut had, you won't think they "can hold their own with even Tutankhamen's jewels," as Brier put it. In fact, my first impression of the Tanite stuff was, "That's not so great." Already the artwork is cruder than that of the New Kingdom, even to my untrained eye; it doesn't have the charm or grandeur of Tut's treasures. Here's a rare picture of the silver hawk-headed coffin of Shoshenk II:
Finally, to add a political note to this thread, the royal occupants were corrupt. Except for the gold masks and silver coffins, just about everything in the tombs was stolen from older burials. Psusennes I's coffin was in a granite sarcophagus belonging to the XIX dynasty's Merneptah, while another sarcophagus came from a Middle Kingdom tomb; each of the canopic jars had a different person's name on it; a lapis lazuli necklace on Psusennes was originally a gift from the Assyrians to Amenhotep III. All I can say in defense of Psusennes is that when he appropriated the tomb, at least he didn't completely evict the original occupants; he just moved them to the outer chambers. It is hard to imagine how these rulers could arrange to have their mummies buried with somebody's else's belongings, and expect to get away with it when facing Osiris in the final judgment. Maybe that is why the tombs were so small and carefully concealed; Psusennes and company didn't want to risk their bodies suffering the same fate they had inflicted on others.
