February 2002 - Nr. 2
Munich Returns Pharaoh’s Coffin to Cairo
TWIG - A golden coffin that may have once held the remains of the pharaoh Akhenaton was shipped from Munich back to Cairo on Friday, its magnificent lid matched up with a base that had been missing from Egypt since 1931. The two halves of the coffin were reunited in October and formed the centerpiece of a three-month exhibit at the State Museum for Egyptian Art in Munich.
When it was first discovered in 1907 in Tomb 55 of the Valley of the Kings, the coffin was considered a spectacular find. It was immediately identified as one of the treasures of Amarna, the capital founded by Akhenaton in the 14th century BC. Sometime during the course of its restoration at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the fragmented base of the coffin went astray. It remained lost until 1980, when a Swiss art dealer asked Dietrich Wildung, then director of the Munich museum, to identify what looked like a few scraps of gold foil inlayed with semiprecious stones and some pieces of rotten wood.
How the coffin came to Europe is still a mystery. So is the true identity of the mummy it once contained. Some Egyptologists believe the mummy found in the golden coffin may have been that of Akhenaton’s short-lived successor, Smenkhkare. But Wildung, now at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, is certain the coffin was built for Akhenaton himself, the ruler who launched a religious revolution by declaring no god existed but Aton, the sun. In restoring the base of the coffin, he says, specialists found an inscription bearing an emblem only used for the "heretic" pharaoh.
Munich art historians spent almost three years reconstructing the coffin base with the help of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, as Bavarian officials negotiated its return in exchange for a permanent loan of other works from the museum’s collection. A change of guard at the Cairo museum and the shifting political climate in Egypt delayed the process until May 2001, when Bavarian governor Edmund Stoiber announced the coffin would be returned unconditionally. In response, the Egyptian Museum loaned the lid to Munich for its special exhibit, "The Mystery of the Golden Coffin." A spectacular success, the show closed January 20 after attracting more than 40,000 visitors.
