I. The Boy King

Approximately 3,336 years ago, Tutankhamun, a minor king in a major Egyptian dynasty—the 18th—breathed his last. He was in his late teens, and he had reigned since he was nine years old. After a brief mourning period, the pharaoh’s acolytes swung into action, mounting an epic of funerary ceremony worthy of Cecil B. DeMille.

First came embalming. Tutankhamun’s heart was left intact, but other vital internal organs—his liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines—were removed, preserved, wrapped in cloth, and placed in four mini-coffins, each about a foot and a quarter long and made of gold inlaid with carnelian stone and colored glass.

The pharaoh’s body was washed, anointed with herbs and unguents, adorned with more than a hundred amulets, rings, and bangles, and then carefully wrapped in strips of linen. The mummy was laid in a coffin of solid gold, the delicate face on its lid fashioned in Tutankhamun’s image and framed by the customary pharaonic nemes, or striped headdress. Before the lid went on, the pharaoh’s undertakers gently placed over his head a magnificent 22-pound portrait mask in burnished gold: the nose pointed, the cheeks smooth, and the lips and chin fleshy, with wide eyes outlined in lapis lazuli.

The gold coffin was placed inside a larger coffin of gilded wood, which was housed, nesting-doll-style, inside a still-larger coffin, also of gilded wood. The nested coffins were then lowered into a heavy, rectangular sarcophagus of yellow quartzite, its sides etched with hieroglyphs, its corners featuring relief carvings of the protective goddesses Isis, Nephthys, Selket, and Neith. For good measure, the sarcophagus was itself nested in four ornately decorated chests known as shrines, each bigger than the last. The outermost shrine, made of gilded cedar, was 16 1/2 feet long and 9 feet high. Tutankhamun’s preserved viscera got their own gilded shrine, its four sides guarded by the same four goddesses—this time spectacularly rendered as fully three-dimensional sculptures of gold-painted wood, each about three feet high, with arms outstretched and heads turned sideways, as if on the lookout for intruders.

The pharaoh’s remains were carried down into a tomb west of the Upper Nile, in the vast royal necropolis known as the Valley of the Kings. So, too, were all manner of mementos and goods from Tutankhamun’s life: disassembled chariots, a childhood gaming board, furniture, lamps, sculpture, weapons, jewelry. The tomb, a mini-labyrinth of tunnels, chambers, and blocked passageways, was sealed. And that was that. Tutankhamun’s followers had done what they could to equip the pharaoh for a safe journey through the underworld to a joyful afterlife.

Approximately 3,299 years later, in the summer of 1976, many of these same items, including the gold mask, lay swaddled and packed in one of the holds of the U.S.S. Sylvania, a navy ship bound for Norfolk, Virginia. This had not been the original transport plan. The American organizers of the six-city “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibition, which was to run from late 1976 to early 1979, believed that the most prudent course was to bring the ancient artifacts over to the United States by airplane. But Gamal Mokhtar, the chairman of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, was fearful of a crash or a hijacking. He demanded, more or less at the last minute, that the artifacts travel to America in secrecy, aboard a U.S. naval vessel. The Sylvania was what is known in U.S. Navy parlance as a combat-stores ship, its job to supply provisions, among them fresh and frozen foods, to warships out at sea. And so, the precious Tutankhamun artifacts made their way across the Mediterranean sharing cargo space with refrigerated boxes of hamburger patties.