The mourners took it apart, sawing through the axle so it would fit in the tomb corridors. Then robbers disturbed it and the priests hurriedly pushed together the pieces, higgledy-piggledy.

More than 3,000 years later it took an Egyptian conservator eight years to restore Tutankhamun’s chariot, right. One of six found in the tomb, it was in more than 200 pieces when Dr Nadia Lokma started work. A lightweight chariot, used for training or exercise, it is made of a number of local and foreign woods, most of them bent to purpose.

“It was enormously difficult,” she says. “All of the wood had twisted and had to be bent slowly back into shape without damaging it. And of course there was no plan – only two Egyptian chariots had been found until then. It was exciting: there was plenty of evidence that it had been used, and for some time.”

Lokma likes a challenge: her next is the great cedar and gilded shrine, 16ft 8in by 10ft 9in and 9ft high, that contained four more shrines, and then the Pharaoh’s golden sarcophagus. It has to be dismantled and completely restored before its removal to the new Great Museum at Giza. The estimated cost? £1.5 million.

Egypt Travel

• Discover the Nile on a voyage into the past
• The pharaohs get a face-lift
• Bringing Egypt's history to life for the kids