This is for the first time in the history, since its discovery in 1922, the precious gold-covered coffin of the infamous boy-pharaoh ,Tutankhamun, is under a restoration process in Egypt now. The refurbishment is in progress as Egypt is about to complete its new Grand Egyptian Museum(GEM) – a mega project going on near the pyramids of Giza, outside Cairo. 
To have the rare glimpse of the coffin, which was placed inside a plastic incubator, a wide array of journalists swarmed to the under-construction museum, of these days. The museum is about to open towards the end of 2020.
The restoration work on the young pharaoh’s three-layered coffin began in mid-July and is expected to take around eight more months to be completed. The coffin was shifted from Tutankhamun’s tomb near Luxor to the GEM last month only.
King Tutankhamun ascended the throne at a tender age of 9-years-old and ruled until his death at age 18 or 19. Representing the 18th Egyptian dynasty, he ruled Egypt from 1332 to 1323 B.C.
The boy-king’s world renowned burial mask — made of solid gold and embellished with semi-precious stones went through a little repair work in recent years after workers at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo broke the mask’s beard in 2014 and tried to fix it with epoxy glue.
Undoubtedly the restoration task of such antiquated body is to be carried out with utmost care. Speaking on this Khaled El-Anany, the antiquities minister of Egypt told, “As you can see, it was a very delicate project because the coffin is very fragile. Which is why we did a first-aid intervention inside the tomb, and the transportation was very difficult. Stored isolated in a room for seven days, its fumigation process will take place now for three weeks, and then we can expect between eight and nine months of work to reach a good preservation state.”
Some internal turmoil’s followed by some political unrest in 2011, thwarted Egypt’s Tourism in recent years. With a decent record of more than 14.7 million tourists in 2010, the country witnessed only 9.8 million tourists footfalls last year, according to the country’s finance ministry.
So all its hope is pivoting on GEM, that is being anticipated to be one of the largest museums in the world, to lure more visitors from all across the globe.
GEM is going to be proved as a wonderful gift to the world as it will display more than 5,000 artefacts of the Tutankhamun collection, for the first time. While for now the Cairo Museum is satisfying its visitors with less than 3,000 objects only.
Explaining on this El-Anany said, “We’ve moved 48,000 objects to the GEM already. … The main masterpieces will be kept in Tahrir for the tourists who will visit Egypt until the opening of the GEM. Later on all of them will be transferred to the GEM a few days before its opening.”
