Tutankhamun's golden mask, his throne, and the 5,000 funerary objects that the young pharaoh took to his tomb 3,500 years ago are finally on display together in their new home. The Grand Egyptian Museum opens its doors this Saturday on the Giza plateau, 20 kilometers from Cairo, with the monumental pyramids of Khufu and Menkaure silhouetted 2 kilometers away on the horizon. It is a pharaonic project in every sense: it occupies 48 hectares (twice the size of the Louvre), cost one billion euros (mostly funded by Japan), and will exhibit between 50,000 and 100,000 archaeological pieces from Ancient Egypt. It is the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single civilization.

One day, Irene Cordón Solà-Sagalés (Barcelona, ​​1972), a doctor in archaeology and ancient history, with a master's degree in Egyptology and a law degree, had had enough. She was fed up with the idealized vision that novelists, historians, and Hollywood all came from the pharaohs. She wrote the book Pharaohs of Silicon Valley (Capsule), where he pours out some of this rage and argues why we shouldn't idolize the rulers of Ancient Egypt and why they are not so different from Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or Benjamin Netanyahu.

The arid desert conditions and the practice of embalming and mummification, which was widespread socioculturally during the periods of various Egyptian dynasties, make obtaining DNA from human remains extremely difficult. It should be noted that the liquids used in the mummification process degrade and destroy the genetic material of all soft tissues, which remain as leather. Inside a rock-cut tomb in the ancient necropolis of Nuwayrat (a town about 265 kilometers from Cairo), a large sealed clay tub was found, containing the unembalmed body of an adult man.

Egypt has confirmed that the tomb discovered in 2022 in the west of the necropolis of Thebes (Luxor) is that of Tuthmosis II, the fourth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, who reigned from 1490 BC to 1475 BC, and who married his sister. It is the first discovery of an Egyptian royal tomb since Howard Carter showed the tomb of Tutankhamun to the world in 1922. Tuthmosis II is believed to have had a rather weak constitution and died when he was about thirty. Hatshepsut then temporarily reigned in place of her stepson, Tuthmosis III, and became the first female pharaoh in history.