Tutankhamun Gold Death Mask is Moving to a New Home

Shortly, the elaborately decorated artifact will be transferred to the brand new Grand Egyptian Museum.

For nearly a century, visitors have flocked to the Egyptian Museum on Cairo’s Tahrir Square to admire Tutankhamun’s funerary mask, the intricately decorated artifact designed to cover the mummified pharaoh’s face.

Starting this summer, they’ll be able to see the mask in its new home, the $1 billion Grand Egyptian Museum located in nearby Giza. Officials will soon transfer the mask to the massive new venue, where it will join more than 5,000 artifacts from the boy king’s tomb.

“Only 26 objects from the Tutankhamun collection, including the golden mask and two coffins, remain here [at the Egyptian Museum] in Tahrir,” says Ali Abdel Halim, director of the Egyptian Museum, to the Agence France-Presse. “All are set to be moved soon.”

Halim didn’t say when the death mask will be transferred, but the new Grand Egyptian Museum is scheduled to fully open to the public in early July after years of delays.

Some portions of the Grand Egyptian Museum have been open since November 2023, with an additional 12 exhibit halls opening last October. Designed by Dublin studio Heneghan Peng Architects, the vast complex is the world’s biggest museum focused on a single civilization, encompassing a 90,000 square metre site (5 million square feet) in 50 hectares (123 acres) of space right in the shadows of Cairo’s mighty Giza pyramids. The museum houses more than 100,000 artifacts.

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