The Egyptian painters who decorated King Tut’s burial chamber had to work quickly—the pharaoh died unexpectedly, at about the age of nineteen, and proper preparations had not been made. Plaster was applied to lumpy limestone walls. On the chamber’s western wall, twelve baboons with an identical design are arrayed in a grid, and various slip-ups suggest haste: one of the baboons is missing a black outline around its penis. When the entrance to the chamber was sealed, some thirty-five hundred years ago, the baboons, along with the gods and goddesses depicted in other panels, were expected to maintain their poses for eternity. This wasn’t an entirely naïve hope. Tutankhamun was interred in the Valley of the Kings, the vast network of tombs in the hills outside Luxor, four hundred miles south of Cairo. The air in the valley is bone-dry, and pigment applied to a plastered wall in a lightless, undisturbed chamber should decay little over the centuries. When the British archeologist Howard Carter unsealed the burial vault, in 1923, turning the obscure Tutankhamun into the modern icon of ancient Egypt, the yellow walls remained dazzlingly intact. The Egyptians had made only one mistake: they had closed the tomb before the paint, or Tut’s mummy, had dried, and bacteria had fed on the moisture, imposing a leopard pattern of brown dots on the yellow background. The room is known as the House of Gold.

Since then, tens of millions of tourists have crowded inside the living-room-size chamber, exuding a swampy mist of breath and sweat, which has caused the plaster to expand and contract. Bahaa AbdelGaber, an Egyptian antiquities official, told me recently that the temperature inside the Luxor tombs sometimes exceeds a hundred and twenty degrees. “Oh, the smell on a busy day!” he said.

In 2009, a team of conservators from the Getty Conservation Institute, in California, visited Tut’s tomb and determined that some painted areas had become dangerously loosened. The conservators cleaned portions of the walls and applied adhesives to flaking paint, in an effort to forestall pictorial losses. Reversibility is a prime rule of modern conservation, and, according to the latest scholarly thinking, these physical interventions were safe.

Recently, I visited Luxor. For the past several years, terrorism and political tumult have devastated Egypt’s tourist economy. Going into the Valley of the Kings felt like sneaking into the Metropolitan Museum in the middle of the night: I had the place to myself, but the privilege was discomfiting. Before 2011, when tourism in Egypt was at its peak, a thousand people a day visited Tut’s tomb. Now, in a parking lot the size of a football field, a lonely bus baked in the sun. Tram cars that convey tourists up the inclines between tombs had been abandoned near the ticket kiosk, coiled together like snakes. The Valley of the Kings looks like an elegant quarry; as I approached the tombs, it was so quiet that I heard the skittering of every pebble dislodged by my shoes.

To my eye, the Getty’s touch-ups looked nimble. Freed of desert grime, the marigold pigment saturated my field of vision. But, as with plastic surgery, some treatments don’t hold up well over time. Lori Wong, a Getty conservator who has worked in the tomb, is a model of circumspection, and she told me that the Getty was “really cautious” when making interventions. But the scientific understanding of how treatment materials affect art works keeps changing. For example, a 2013 study suggests that the adhesive Paraloid B-72, which previous conservators applied to the wall paintings in Tut’s tomb, can cause “chromatic variations” in surface pigments. Other research has suggested that the adhesive isn’t fully reversible: getting rid of it can dislodge paint. In the end, every physical alteration is a risk. Too often, the main reason to restore a treasured art work is to remedy a botched restoration. Wong said that she has removed patches of B-72 that had left “a shiny surface,” as well as “a fair amount of surface drips” caused by old repainting efforts.

I have seen what Tut’s tomb looked like before conservation work began. Dust had settled on protrusions in the walls, and, though these areas were a bit distracting, they allowed the murals to double as relief maps, underscoring the fact that the walls had been chiselled by hand. More troubling were the bacterial splotches. The goddess Nut, stylishly attired in a white dress with a red belt, appeared to have a five-o’clock shadow.

When this detail leaped out at me, I was not standing in the real tomb. I was inside a full-sized replica that has been installed on a gravelly hillside about a mile east of Tutankhamun’s resting place. The facsimile had been made by digitally recording the tomb, in 2009, with a fleet of scanners, for seven weeks. Nut and her companions were immortalized at actual size, and at a resolution of up to eight hundred dots per inch. After the data sets from the scans were stitched together on a computer screen, the quilt of 0s and 1s was returned to physical form. The process eerily echoed that of making a fresco. First came the walls. A recording of their topography, capturing every bulbous paint drip, was rendered in 3-D by a computer-numerical-control milling machine, which produced two hundred and forty panels of high-density polyurethane. The panels, which mimicked the uneven surface of the original walls, were fitted together. The ersatz walls were then wrapped with a flexible “skin,” of a gesso-like material, bearing a lush ink-jet printout of the frescoes. Mummified walls: a nice Egyptian touch.

The man who led the facsimile project, a proudly dishevelled Englishman named Adam Lowe, was admiring the fake walls alongside me. Lowe prefers to call them “rematerialized” walls. He whispered, “Amazing—it looks just like the real thing, doesn’t it?” He is fifty-seven years old, and looks like what Paul McCartney might look like had McCartney never undergone restoration. Lowe, a former painter, who, in the nineteen-eighties, became obsessed with printmaking, runs Factum Arte, a “digital mediation” workshop that is based in Madrid. It took two years for Lowe and several dozen technicians to remake the Tutankhamun walls—considerably longer than the ancient Egyptians took to produce them. Perfecting the digital printout, he told me, had involved hundreds of hours of analog assessment: thousands of paint samples were mixed by hand, in Luxor, to match the tones in the original tomb, then compared with ink-jet outputs. Factum modified an enormous Epson printer so that it could make repeated passes over the gesso-like skin in perfect registration, allowing for fine tweaks.

Two versions of a medieval Christ: a computer-milled wooden facsimile (right) and a 3-D-printed model. Photograph by Henrik Spohler for The New Yorker

As I examined the facsimile, I was prepared to summon my inner Walter Benjamin and bemoan the mechanical reproduction’s lack of an “aura.” But there were no Disneyfied abominations: the baboons, with their playful upturned tails, looked as mischievous, mold-mottled, and ancient as the originals. I could make out the spot where, in a long brushstroke outlining a baboon’s crest, the artist had just begun to run out of paint. In their brutal objectivity, the 2009 scans had recorded beauty and blemish alike. “That’s printed dust,” Lowe joked, pointing at a baboon that had been painted on a particularly bumpy area. “It’s not something that will just come off.” The only thing that was perceptibly modern was the absence of a musty odor. Lowe noted that the room’s sound wasn’t right, either. He hopes to enlist engineers to record the “acoustic signature” of Tutankhamun’s tomb, so that he can re-create it inside the facsimile.