03/09/2026
The translator for Chinese President Xi Jinping was clearly impressed by the funerary mask of King Tutankhamun.
Interestingly, despite this mask being considered the most famous piece of art in history, King Tutankhamun himself had no notable achievements during his lifetime. His ministers, Ay and Horemheb, placed him there as a mere figurehead after his father, Akhenaten, unified the gods under Aten, dismissed the priests, and abolished their power. Tutankhamun reinstated the priests, distributed titles, brought order to the land, and revived the worship of Amun. He ascended the throne at the age of nine, had a leg disability, and walked with a cane. He died at the age of 18 from a fractured leg, gangrene, and malaria. In short, he was merely a tool, nothing more.
Even this mask, there's a theory that it didn't belong to him...
It was actually made for Nefertiti, his stepmother. But when he died suddenly, and because of a power struggle among the ministers, they took the mask, added some embellishments, and soldered some gold on it to make it resemble Tutankhamun's. They transformed it in 60 days, but they forgot the ear piercing, which is a feminine tradition. Also, his tomb didn't belong to him; the theory is that it belonged to a nobleman and was taken for Tutankhamun because they hadn't built a tomb for him.
Despite all this...
The mask is more famous and greater than the Mona Lisa, both globally and historically. It's purely Egyptian, the most famous piece of art created by our ancestors, displayed in a museum that doesn't exhibit stolen artifacts. It's a mask that belonged to a king 3350 years ago, and this explains the look of amazement on the translator's face, and the fleeting fascination the Chinese leader tried to hide behind a smile, in the face of a civilization older and greater than China itself.
