Every time a visitor enters Tutankhamun’s funerary chamber, the 3,000-year-old walls deteriorate a little further. The changes in humidity caused by visitors’ breath mean that the painted plaster expands and contracts over the course of each day, and the dust which they bring into the room and circulate around it is so thick that it has to be wiped off the modern glass cover of the sarcophagus each morning. In other tombs of the Valley of the Kings, conservation attempts using outdated methods have done more harm than good, raising the possibility that within a few years, some painted plaster surfaces will come away from their walls. Close inspection of Tutankhamun’s tomb reveals that there have already been significant collapses which have been refilled and repainted – an approach which turns the original into a reproduction of itself.

The creation of a facsimile as a means to help the preservation of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings from the damage caused by mass tourism was first imagined in 1988 by Theodore Abt, Erik Hornung and the Society of Friends of the Royal Tombs of Egypt. In 2002, Factum Arte’s exact facsimile of the Tomb of Thutmosis III had already demonstrated the level of accuracy achievable in both digitisation and physical results. 

Following a feasibility study carried out by Factum Arte in 2002, the project was approved by the Supreme Council of Antiquities and was launched in 2009 by Dr Zahi Hawass and the Supreme Council in collaboration with the University of Basel, The Friends of the Royal tombs of Egypt, Factum Arte, and the newly formed Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Preservation.

The funeral chamber was recorded between March and May 2009, with scan data at a resolution of 600-800 DPI at a 1:1 scale.

From 2009 to 2012, the Factum team in Madrid worked to process the data and to create the facsimile of the tomb – the highest resolution large-scale facsimile project ever undertaken at that time.

In addition to the tomb as it now stands, a missing fragment from the South Wall of the chamber, known from the photographs of Howard Carter’s photographer Harry Burton, was also recreated, allowing visitors to see what it would have looked like.

In November 2012 the finished facsimile was given to the people of Egypt by Baroness Catherine Ashton on behalf of the European Union. In 2013, the Minister for Antiquities, Dr Mohamed Ibrahim, took the decision to install the facsimile on the site next to Carter’s House.

Two members of the local team at the entrance to the facsimile.

Sunset on the first evening of the completion of the exterior.

The exterior in the evening with the lights of the valley road in the background

On the 30th April 2014 the facsimile of the funerary chamber of Tutankhamun was opened to the public by the Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, Mohamed Ibrahim, in the presence of the Minister of Tourism, Hisham Zazou, The Governor of Luxor, Tarek Saad el Din, the EU ambassador James Moran and about 25 other ambassadors from the EU countries, Malaysia, Mexico, India and elsewhere. The atmosphere was one of deep excitement and joy. The facsimile, which is identical to the original at normal viewing distances, was located within a small museum with a display explaining why it looks as it does and why it is so difficult to preserve something that was built to last for eternity but not to be visited. Click here to read the exhibition's texts, written by Adam Lowe, Jaromir Malek and Nicholas Reeves.

Minister of Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim and Adam Lowe entering the facsimile on the 30th April during the opening

 

Adam Lowe and Michael Roberts embrace members of the Egyptian team during the lunch organized for the workers on the first day of the opening of the facsimile

To go to the high-resolution data from the tomb, click here.

To watch a BBC Travel Show episode about the facsimile, hosted by Rajan Datar, click here.

To see the English version of the full report on the scanning of the tomb of Tutankhamun for the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), click here. For the Arabic version, click here.

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