The Trumpets of Tutankhamun

Two small straight trumpets, one silver and one bronze or copper with a gilded bell, were found in Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922-1923 and are the only trumpets to survive from ancient Egypt. On 16 April 1939 the silver trumpet was played live on BBC radio to an estimated 150 million listeners, five months before the outbreak of the Second World War, a coincidence that has followed the instruments ever since as a reported omen rather than a documented fact.

The silver trumpet cracked during rehearsal for that broadcast and was played on air only after emergency repair. A single, disputed claim by a museum curator in 2011 extended the omen story backward to 1967 and 1990, though no independent record of either playing has been found. What is documented is that the bronze trumpet was stolen during the 2011 revolution and recovered weeks later, and that conservators now regard playing either instrument again as too dangerous to the fragile 3,000-year-old metal to attempt.

Both trumpets have moved with the rest of Tutankhamun's grave goods from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, which opened in November 2025, where they are held in a humidity- and temperature-controlled case together with the original painted wooden cores that once lined their tubes.

Two trumpets, not one

Tutankhamun's tomb produced two trumpets, and they are physically distinct objects that are routinely run together in popular retelling. One is silver, 57.2 centimetres long, catalogued by Howard Carter as object 175 and by the Egyptian Museum as JE 62007. The other is bronze or copper with a gilded bell, about 49.6 centimetres long, catalogued as Carter object 050gg and JE 62008. They were found a full excavation season apart, in different rooms of the tomb, and they are decorated differently. This record treats them together because they were excavated as a functional pair and have shared almost their entire modern history, including the 1939 broadcast that made them famous, but it keeps their separate identities distinct throughout.

Both are described in scholarship as the oldest playable metal trumpets known to survive anywhere, and the only trumpets to survive from ancient Egypt at all. That claim rests on absence of a competing find rather than on any inscription saying so, and it is treated here as the current state of the evidence, not a settled fact for all time.

Discovery: two seasons, two rooms

The bronze trumpet came first. Howard Carter's team found it in the first excavation season, 1922-1923, in the tomb's Antechamber, inside a chest of military-associated equipment. The Griffith Institute's record of Carter's own object card lists the find location simply as the Antechamber and gives the excavation season as the first, 1922-1923.

The silver trumpet was found later, in the second season, 1923-1924, and in a very different setting: on the floor of the Burial Chamber itself, in a corner between the chamber wall and the outermost of the four gilded shrines that surrounded the king's sarcophagus. That findspot, at the heart of the tomb rather than among stored military gear, is itself a piece of evidence about how the two instruments were regarded, even though no text explains the distinction.

Both objects were photographed in the tomb and in the Cairo laboratory by Harry Burton, the excavation's official photographer, whose glass-plate negatives remain the primary visual record of the trumpets in the condition in which Carter's team first encountered them. Two of those Burton photographs, both long since in the public domain, are the lead plates for this record.

How the bronze trumpet was made

The bronze (or copper alloy) trumpet's slightly conical tube is a rolled sheet of copper alloy between 0.2 and 0.25 millimetres thick, a wall thickness thin enough that the instrument's survival at all is a small piece of luck. Its bell is not the same metal as its tube: the bell is an electrum-like gold alloy between 0.1 and 0.13 millimetres thick, and the ring at the mouthpiece end, about 3.25 millimetres thick, was probably also electrum. That is a deliberate, expensive design choice: a cheaper metal for the body of the instrument and a precious-metal bell and mouthpiece ring for the parts that would be seen and touched.

The decorated panel on the bell places Tutankhamun's cartouches beside images of Amun, Re-Horakhty and Ptah, and on this trumpet the king himself is shown joining the three gods in the register, rather than appearing only by name. Those three gods were, individually, among the most important state deities of the New Kingdom, and modern commentary connects them to the reported association of each with one of the army's major divisions, which if correct would make the decoration a compact statement of the whole New Kingdom military establishment on a single object small enough to hold in two hands. That specific reading is argued rather than inscribed; this record reports it as an argument, not as the ancient maker's stated intention.

How the silver trumpet was made

The silver trumpet is described in the sources consulted with less of the metallurgical precision available for the bronze instrument, but its decoration is recorded in more specific detail. Its bell carries the same kind of cartouche-and-deity panel as the bronze trumpet, naming Tutankhamun and showing the gods, but the panel appears to have been added over, and to have partly erased, an earlier decorative scheme: a whorl of sepals and calices forming a stylised lotus flower, traces of which are still visible flanking the later panel.

That sequence, an original lotus motif partly cut away to make room for the royal cartouche panel, is worth pausing on. It suggests either a change of decorative plan during manufacture or a re-decoration of an object that already existed in a simpler form, and no source consulted for this record explains which. It is recorded here as an open question rather than resolved either way.

What they were for

The instruments are short, straight, largely cylindrical trumpets with no valves and no means of altering pitch beyond the player's lips, and modern acoustic testing on reproductions, described by the musicologist Jeremy Montagu, found that they can produce at most three natural notes: a low note of little carrying power, a normally usable middle tone, and a top note that puts so much strain on the tube that sounding it risks destroying the instrument. Montagu's conclusion, as reported in the secondary literature surveyed for this record, is that in practice only the single middle tone was likely used, sounded in a rhythmic pattern functioning as a signalling code rather than as music in the sense of a melody.

That reading is consistent with the trumpets' military associations: their find contexts (one among a chest of martial equipment, the other in the burial chamber itself, an unusually honoured placement) and their decoration (state gods with reported army-division associations) both point toward the instrument's function as army signalling equipment that had also acquired a place among the king's most personal grave goods. Whether the trumpets were ever used for ceremonial, as opposed to strictly military, signalling in life is not established in any source consulted, and is recorded as unresolved.

The wooden cores, and what they were for

Both trumpets retain a wooden core inside the metal tube, and what that core was for is itself unsettled in the sources surveyed. One line of description treats the wood as a structural liner: internal support that helped the fragile metal tube keep its shape, whether during use, in storage during the king's life, or simply while packed away in the tomb for three thousand years. A different line of description, attached to a modern museum photograph of the silver trumpet and its core, calls the wooden piece a sourdine, a mute, and states that a player used it, painted in bright colours, to modulate the trumpet's tone while playing.

Those two explanations are not automatically compatible: a structural liner that stays in the tube at all times is a different object, functionally, from a mute a player inserts and withdraws to change the sound. This record has not found a source that reconciles them, and reports both as they were found rather than picking one. What is agreed across every source is that the wooden cores are fragile, are original to the tomb rather than modern replacements, and now travel and are displayed with their trumpets rather than separately.

16 April 1939: the BBC broadcast

On 16 April 1939 both trumpets were played live for a BBC radio broadcast transmitted from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, reaching, by widely repeated estimate, some 150 million listeners worldwide. The broadcast was arranged by the BBC's Rex Keating, and its best-documented modern retelling rests on Keating's own account, later given for the BBC Radio 4 documentary Ghost Music (2011).

Press accounts agree on the outline and disagree on some detail. During rehearsal, a modern brass mouthpiece, packed to fit the ancient oversized mouth end because the original mouthpiece could not be used safely, was fitted to the silver trumpet; the attempt produced, in Keating's phrase, an ear-splitting discord, and the crystallised ancient silver fractured, with one account specifying that the bell came away from the stem entirely. Alfred Lucas, the chemist who had worked on conserving finds from the tomb since Carter's original excavation, is reported in multiple accounts to have been so distressed by the damage that he required hospital treatment. Some retellings place an unnamed Hussar Regiment bandsman at the mouthpiece during this rehearsal mishap, with the trumpeter who actually performed on air, James Tappern of Prince Albert's Own 11th Royal Hussars, brought in afterward; other, shorter accounts simply attribute the whole episode to Tappern without distinguishing a rehearsal player from the broadcaster. This record has not been able to resolve that discrepancy and reports it as an open question rather than silently picking the more dramatic version.

The broadcast itself went ahead, by more than one account after a power failure forced the museum to fall back on candlelight, with a mended silver trumpet and the bronze trumpet both played by Tappern before the microphone. Reporting from 2026 records Tappern (understood in context as describing the experience, whether at the time or in later recollection drawn on by CNN's coverage) calling the moment one in which the intimacy is extraordinary, and quotes the Egyptologist Salima Ikram characterising the recording as an auditory and sensory bridge between the time of Tutankhamun and now, and suggesting that the pairing of a silver, moon-associated trumpet with a golden, sun-associated one could be read as standing for the twelve hours of day and twelve of night that make up the king's journey through the afterlife, a reading offered by a named scholar and reported here as her argument, not as an ancient text's statement.

The war-omen legend, and who actually said it

The idea that playing the trumpets calls up war followed directly from timing: the 1939 broadcast preceded the outbreak of the Second World War by five months, and that coincidence alone was enough to attach a folk association to the instruments that has outlasted every person present at the original event. This record states plainly that no source consulted offers evidence of a causal link, only a sequence of dates, and that the claim is reported here as a belief people have held and repeated, not as an established fact.

The claim that the trumpets were sounded again in 1967, shortly before the Six-Day War, and again in 1990 or 1991, around the Gulf War, traces in the sources surveyed for this record to a single identifiable origin: a 2011 Al-Ahram Online report by the journalist Nevine El-Aref, covering the recovery of artefacts stolen from the Egyptian Museum during that year's revolution, in which Hala Hassan, curator of the Tutankhamun collection, is quoted as saying the bronze trumpet has magical powers and that whenever someone blows into it, a war occurs, and as citing the 1967 and 1990-91 instances by way of illustration, alongside a further claim that a staff member had blown into the trumpet during a documentation session shortly before the 2011 revolution itself. No source consulted for this record independently corroborates that any of the 1967 or 1990-91 playings took place, on what date, or who performed them; the claim rests entirely on one curator's account in one 2011 newspaper report. It is reported here as a curator's stated belief, attributed by name and by publication, not as a documented event.

The 2011 theft, which is documented

Separately from the omen legend, and considerably better documented, is the theft of the bronze trumpet during the unrest that accompanied the January 2011 revolution. Among roughly eighteen objects taken from the Tutankhamun galleries of the Egyptian Museum when rioters entered the building on 28 January 2011, the gilded bronze trumpet and its wooden core were reported missing. The trumpet was recovered some weeks later, together with other stolen pieces, found in a bag left at a Cairo metro station, and returned to the museum. This episode, unlike the war-omen claims, is corroborated across the contemporary press coverage of the 2011 museum theft consulted for this record, and it is the actual, verifiable event that the curator's 2011 comment to Al-Ahram was made in the context of discussing.

Why they will probably never sound again

The 1939 rehearsal damage to the silver trumpet is the earliest documented evidence that playing these instruments risks destroying them, and every account of the instruments' subsequent handling treats that risk as settled rather than debatable. Montagu's acoustic finding that the instruments' highest natural note applies enough pressure to the tube to risk destroying it independently supports the same conclusion from a different angle: these are not modern brass instruments built to withstand repeated use, but 3,000-year-old sheet-metal objects whose structural margin was already thin when new.

Speaking in 2026, Salima Ikram put the conservation judgment plainly: in an ideal world a replica would have been made and tested first, and playing the originals in 1939 was, in her words, quite dangerous, and taught us a lesson. The Museum of World Treasures, summarising the instruments' later custodial history, reports that historians (in context, the museum's own conservators and curators) have vowed the trumpets are never to be played again, on the combined grounds of fragility and historical significance. No source consulted for this record documents a formal, published conservation policy by name, only this consistent informal consensus reported by curators and commentators; that absence of a citable written policy is recorded here as a gap, not filled with an assumption that one exists.

From Cairo to Giza

For most of their modern history, both trumpets were displayed in the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square in Cairo, the museum from which the bronze trumpet was briefly stolen in 2011. The Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, built over roughly two decades at a reported cost of more than a billion dollars, opened to the public in November 2025, and Tutankhamun's grave goods, including the trumpets, have moved there as part of the wholesale transfer of the boy king's tomb assemblage to the new site.

CNN's August 2026 report on the trumpets describes them as now held in a climate-controlled display case at the Grand Egyptian Museum, maintained between 18 and 22 degrees Celsius, a range chosen because the wooden cores inside the metal tubes, which once helped the instruments keep their shape, now complicate their preservation by responding differently to humidity and temperature than the surrounding metal. The museum's curator, Jasmien Abdalraouf, is quoted describing the security and climate measures in place. The Griffith Institute's own archival record for the bronze trumpet already lists a Grand Egyptian Museum inventory number, GEM 323, alongside its historic Cairo JE number, consistent with a completed rather than a merely planned transfer.

What is still unresolved

Two gaps run through every source consulted for this record. First, no source gives a reliable, checkable account of who exactly stood at the microphone during the 1939 rehearsal mishap, whether it was Tappern himself or an unnamed predecessor whose error Tappern then had to make good on air. Second, no source offers independent verification, beyond one curator's 2011 recollection, that the trumpets were sounded at all in 1967 or 1990-91; both dates may be entirely real and simply undocumented outside that single account, or they may be later elaborations of the 1939 story attached retroactively to convenient historical dates. This record states both as open rather than guessing at an answer either way.

A third, smaller gap concerns the bronze trumpet's own early paperwork: the Griffith Institute's archival caption for Carter object 050gg reads, in full, Trumpet (called mace), which implies that Carter's team either considered or briefly used a different identification for the object before settling on trumpet. No source consulted explains that earlier label or when the identification changed, and it is recorded here rather than smoothed over.