GOLDEN FUNERAL MASKS

Seminar paper

 

 

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Introduction

The color gold is the color of success, achievement and triumph. Associated with abundance

and prosperity, luxury and quality, prestige and sophistication, value and elegance, the

psychology of this color implies affluence, material wealth and extravagance.

Gold in its physical state, by its very nature, denotes wealth and prestige in every country,

culture and market in the world - it is probably the most valuable and easily traded

commodity available in the global market place.

Gold is linked to masculine energy and the power of the sun, which is the reason why it was

always used for showing power and strenght, especially in ancient world, by kings and

queens, who were often considered gods. Gold helped to keep the mith that kings are gods,

among their people.

Royal families oftenly buried their deceased members with numerous objects, most of them

golden, for the afterlife. In some cultures they were buried with funeral masks, to preserve the

look and facial charachteristics of the deceased. The most spectacular and the most beautiful

of them are golden funeral masks.

In this seminar paper I will write about the most famous golden funeral masks and try to

explain their meaning.

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Golden funeral mask of Tutankhamun

Tutankhamun, his tomb and his death mask should need little introduction. This beautiful

death mask was placed directly over the young king’s mummy. It is made, in chief, of gold

inlaid with blue glass and semi-precious stones. It depicts the king wearing the nemes-

headcloth, originally a kind of wig-covering, with the goddesses Nekhbet and Wadjet on his

brow. These are the two ladies referred to in the official names of Egyptian kings, and are

protective deities. Wadjet, the snake, is almost always shown on the king’s brow, but the

addition of Nekhbet, the vulture, is unusual.

The king also wears the curved beard of a god, again made of blue glass, which also has been

used to inlay the king’s eyebrows and eye-paint. Over the king’s shoulders is a thick collar,

inlaid with lapis lazuli and other semi-precious stones.

The reason why Tutankhamun is depicted like this in his funerary mask can be found

elsewhere in his tomb, on the walls of the shrine which contained his coffins. On this shrine is

the earliest version of an Egyptian text known as the Book of the Heavenly Cow. This book

describes man’s disobedience to the Re when he ruled the earth, his destruction of mankind,

and his eventual departure for the heavens. At the beginning, the Book describes Re:

Now, his Majesty was grown old, and his bones consisted of silver, his flesh of gold, his hair

of real lapis lazuli…

The king, then, is depicted as Re. Egyptian kings, from the fourth dynasty onward, had been

called the “Son of Re”, so it is no surprise that the king should be explicitly identified with the

sun-god in death. Indeed, one of the classics of Egyptian literature,Sinuhe, may explain what,

exactly, the Egyptians thought happened to the king after death. The text describes the death

of Amenemhat I, first king of the 12th Dynasty:

Regnal year 30, month three of the Inundation, day seven: the god departed for his horizon,

the Dual King Sehetepibre flew up to heaven and united with the sun-disc, the flesh of the god

minging with the one who made him….

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These words were written perhaps as much as six-hundred years before Tutankhamun lived,

but Sinuhe appears to have remained a popular work until at least the end of the New

Kingdom , and the exact same phraseology was used to describe the death of Tutankhamun’s

great-great-great grandfather, Tuthmosis III, in the tomb of the soldier Amenemhab.

The mask of Tutankhamun, then, was not just a decorative object, or even an expression of

power and wealth, but for the ancient Egyptians had deep theological and religious meaning,

reflecting beliefs about the afterlife of the king and his relationship with the sun god.

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Mask of Agamemnon

The Mask of Agamemnon is an artifact discovered at Mycenae in 1876 by Heinrich

Schliemann. The artifact is a funeral mask crafted in gold, and was found over the face of a

body located in a burial shaft, designated Grave V, at the site "Grave Circle A, Mycenae".

Schliemann believed that he had discovered the body of the legendary Greek leader

Agamemnon, but modern archaeological research suggests that the mask is from 1550–1500

BC, earlier than the life of Agamemnon. The mask is currently displayed in the National

Archaeological Museum in Athens.

The mask is one of five discovered in the royal shaft graves at Mycenae—three in Grave IV

and two in Grave V. The faces and hands of two children in Grave III are covered with gold

leaf, one covering having holes for the eyes. The mask was designed to be a funeral mask

covered in gold.

The faces of the men are not all covered with masks. That they are men, and warriors, is

suggested by the presence of weapons in their graves. The quantities of gold and carefully

worked artifacts indicate honor, wealth and status. The custom of clothing leaders in gold leaf

is known elsewhere. The Mask of Agamemnon was named by Schliemann after the legendary

Greek king of Homer's Iliad. This mask adorned one of the bodies in the shaft graves at

Mycenae. Schliemann took this as evidence the Trojan War was a real historical event.

The mask of Agamemnon was created from one thick gold sheet, heated and hammered

against a wooden background with the details chased on later with a sharp tool.

In the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, the authenticity of

the mask has been formally questioned. Archaeology magazine has run a series of articles

presenting both sides of the debate. By the time of the excavation of the Shaft Graves, the

Greek Archaeological Society had taken a hand in supervising Schliemann's work.

Proponents of the fraud argument center their case on Schliemann's reputation for salting digs

with artifacts from elsewhere. The resourceful Schliemann, they assert, could have had the

mask manufactured on the general model of the other Mycenaean masks and found an

opportunity to place it in the excavation.

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The Mask of Agamemnon differs from three of the other masks in a number of points: it is

three-dimensional rather than flat, one of the facial hairs are cut out, rather than engraved, the

ears are cut out, the eyes are depicted as both open and shut, with open eyelids, but a line of

closed eyelids across the center, the face alone of all the depictions of faces in Mycenaean art

has a full pointed beard with handlebar mustache, the mouth is well-defined, the brows are

formed to two arches rather than one.

The defense presented prior arguments that the shape of the lip, the triangular beard and the

detail of the beard are nearly the same as the hair and locks of the gold lion-head rhyton from

Shaft Grave IV. Schliemann's duplicity, they claim, has been greatly exaggerated.

Even though this is one of the most important archaeological artifacts, we will never discover

it`s real origin, and that is one of the reasons of the masks fame.

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Golden funeral masks from Trebenište, Macedonia

The discovery of priceless treasures from Trebenište village which is

located on the road Ohrid-Kičevo was spectacular: Antique Macedonian

tombs from the 1st millennium B.C.E. loaded with gold, silver and rich burial

royal gifts. In 2002, the fifth consecutive golden mask was found, which is

a rare practice in archaeology. In less than a century, or more precisely for

84 years, although in a small distance, in the country that actually can not

invest a lot in expensive excavations, five golden masks were found! This

finding, like many others before, once again proved that Macedonia is

indeed Europe's richest archaeological treasure.

Archaeological site Gorenci/Trebenište which dates from 6-5 century BC

was discovered for the first time in 1918. Fifty-six graves, of which the most

important and oldest were 12 royal tombs, the whole dynasty which was

buried with all the features of their power. So far have been discovered:

five gold funerary masks, gold bracelets, gold, silver and bronze vessels,

jewelry, weapons, sandals, etc..

History of the discovery of royal golden masks from the necropolis near

the villages of Trebenište, Radolište and Gorenci (10 miles north of Ohrid)

has long tradition. In this necropolis so far five funerary masks were found

in three occasions, twice in two graves and once a single mask dating from

the late 6th and early 5th century BC, with rich funerary offerings.

The first two masks were found by accident in the spring of

1918.Excavations were made by V.Filow, which in cooperation with

K.Shkorpil revealed seven royal tombs from which the material was robbed

and from Macedonia was taken to the Archeological Museum in Sofia,

Bulgaria, where it is located until today.

In 1934 archaeologist H.Vulić discovered six other royal graves in the same

cemetery, with two other golden masks along with other findings, all of

which were robbed again from Macedonia, and this time taken to the

Serbian National Museum in Belgrade

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Unexpected discovery of these rich graves and funeral golden masks in

Ohrid region shed a new light on Macedonian ancient history and caught

Western European scientists by surprise. They date from the period which

is a whole millennium away from the only other archaeological period

when the gold mask was discovered so far in the Balkans and in Europe

generally.

Golden funeral mask of Chimu, Peru

The Chimu people lived on the north coast of Peru by the Pacific Ocean. They were the

predominant culture in this region between 800 A.D. and 1470 A.D. In this culture, the kings

were considered to be deities, and they retained all their property and privileges after death.

Ancestor worship formed a central part of the Chimu religion. The sun and the moon were

important deities.

The ancient Peruvian people were very skilled in metalwork. They used copper, silver and

gold which were mined locally to make jewelry, vases, and to decorate objects like funeral

masks. Often, the metalworkers combined several kinds of metal by heating furnaces to very

high temperatures and melting the different metals together. Then, they wouldhammer the

metal to flatten it and they would heat it again. The process would be repeated several times

resulting in a smooth and shiny gold surface.

The Chimu believed, like the ancient Egyptians, that there was a life after death. Therefore,

when someone died, the body was mummified and buried in a special room which was filled

with tools, pieces of pottery and other special objects. The body was wrapped in special cloths

and sometimes topped with a wooden or cloth head that was covered with a gold mask like

this one. Because the climate was so dry, the mummies and their coverings were very well-

preserved. This mask is an example of the kind of artifact or object that an archaeologist

might find in a burial site.

Patterns were hammered into the mask with a stone tool. On this mask, the mouth is a very

straight line and the eyes are teardrop shapes, which is characteristic of the art of the Chimu

people. The circular shapes at the bottom of either side of the mask are ear plugs and

correspond to the large ear ornaments that were worn by the Chimu people. Originally, there

would have been a three-dimensional gold nose which has probably fallen off over time.

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Many gold masks like this one have traces of paint on them. If you look closely at this one,

you can see some traces of red that may have been its original paint color.

Funeral masks like this Chimu example were elaborately painted and ornamented. Almost the

entire golden surface would be hidden, with perhaps only the nose and the outline of the eyes

remaining uncovered. A measure of the awe the Europeans experienced before the golden and

˝barbaric˝ treasures of ancient America can be understood by looking at this mask.

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