Egypt has officially asked that Germany hand over the 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti.

Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, sent a letter requesting the return of the statue to Herman Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin.

Egypt maintains that the diary of the archaeologist who discovered the bust shows he misled authorities when it was transferred abroad. The council says that Ludwig Borchardt, who found the head in 1912, knew that the limestone bust was of Nefertiti and instead listed it as a “painted plaster bust of a princess.”

German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann has said that his country’s procurement of the bust was lawful and that Egypt had no grounds to demand its return. Germany refused to lend the statue in 2007, citing its fragility.

Egypt first requested Nefertiti’s return in 1925. Germany agreed to hand it over in 1935 before Adolf Hitler decided it should stay. It has remained in Germany ever since.

Excerpted from an article by Mahmoud Kassem for Bloomberg

On Monday, Germany said the latest Egyptian request did not change anything and that Cairo needed to use different channels if it wanted to make a formal request.

“This is not an official request for (her) return by the Egyptian state to Germany,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Andreas Peschke told reporters. “Such a request for her return would have to be directed from government to government, and that is not the case.”

That view was echoed by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees museums in Berlin. It pointed out that the letter was not signed by Nazif.

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The Ruhr Museum in Essen in the west of Germany has now assembled a show entitled, The Great Game: Archaeology and Politics in the Colonial Period. It takes a look at the treasure-hunting era before archaeology settled down to become just another academic subject.

Charlotte Truempler, head of the archaeology department of the new museum, which was inaugurated a month ago, said it was the first show she knew of that had looked at the political implications of turn-of- the-century archaeology.

Some of the 800 artefacts, photographs and films have never been seen in public before. The bust of Nefertiti is represented by a replica made in 1913 for Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The exhibition will continue until June 13.

Earth Times

Dr. Zahi Hawass will soon announce the results of a DNA study conducted on the mummy of King Tutankhamen. The tests are part of a larger ambitious program aimed at confirming the identity of the royal mummies and their familiar relations.

It is believed that Tutankhamen is the son of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who tried to impose a new monotheistic type cult of the solar disk Aten, and thus grandson of Amenhotep III, whose DNA study is already concluded.

Dr. Hawass said DNA studies on all royal mummies and the nearly two dozen unidentified ones stored in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo may well require a revision on the identification of some mummies on display. His ultimate goal is to discover the mummy of Queen Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s wife, and determine whether Tutankhamen is also her son.

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• Egypt to soon announce King Tut DNA test results (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

A meeting was held today at the offices of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, where Dr. Friederike Seyfried, Director of the Aegyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung in Berlin, presented Dr. Hawass with copies of all of the key documentation held by the Berlin Museum concerning the discovery and removal from Egypt of the Bust of Queen Nefertiti.

From the Press Release:

As director of the Berlin Musem, Dr. Seyfried does not have the authority to approve the return of the head to Egypt, but will act as liaison between Dr. Hawass and the relevant German officials, Dr. Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, and Dr. Bernd Neumann, Minister of State for Culture.

Based on the information currently in the possession of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Hawass will call a meeting of the National Committee for the Return of Stolen Artifacts this week, which will then make a formal request for the return of the Bust of Nefertiti.

drhawass.com

In truth, I had no desire to wade into this battle, but I told the media that Egypt is demanding the return of six individual antiquities, and that the real home of these artefacts is their native Egypt. These six antiquities are; the bust of Queen Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum, the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, the Dendera Zodiac at the Louvre in Paris, the statue of Great Pyramid architect Hemiun in Hildesheim’s Pelizaeus Museum, the bust of Prince Ankhhaf in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the statue of King Ramses II in the Turin Museum.

In my opinion, these antiquities are incomparable icons of ancient Egyptian civilization, and so Egypt has the right to recover them, especially given the circumstances surrounding their removal from their native land. I am one of the most vocal opponents of those who say that these antiquities are the property of the country or the museum that they reside in because this is nothing more than one episode in a persistent series of thefts that have seen the antiquities of the Nile Valley being smuggled to rich countries that exploit either the financial or political conditions of a country that has an ancient cultural heritage, until the museums in these [rich] countries have become filled with our antiquities.

The time is ripe for the people of this great civilization to demand the return of their stolen antiquities. This is something that has received strong opposition from the trustees of foreign museums; in fact they have tried to incite public opinion against me by saying that I am calling for the return of all Egyptian antiquities. In truth, I [merely] hope for the return of each of the antiquities [mentioned above] to Egypt, and any antiquity stolen from Egypt following the 1970 UNESCO Convention [on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property].

I myself attempted to discover the intentions of these museums and expose them to public opinion. For this reason I said that we [the Egyptians] wish to display this artefact [the Rosetta Stone] for a period of three months following the grand opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum which is scheduled to open in five years. As for the bust of Nefertiti, we asked permission to display this at the grand opening of the Akhenaton museum, for of course Akhenaton was the beautiful Queen’s husband. However, the strange thing is that while some of these museums politely refused our request, such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that said that the bust of Prince Ankhhaff was too fragile to travel, and the Louvre Museum that indicated that it would be too difficult to remove the Zodiac from the ceiling [where it is displayed] and offered to loan another artefact in its place, the British Museum sent a message saying that it wished to know more about the security measures of the museum that would display the Rosetta Stone, and that this is something that is stipulated by English law.

This is a ridiculous response, because the Grand Egyptian Museum will be one of the most modern [and secure] museums in the world…and this response is one of the reasons that compelled us to insist upon the return of the Rosetta Stone to Egypt; this is our legitimate right, and the Rosetta Stone is part of ancient Egyptian civilization.

asharq alawsat

Art Museum Journal has a full profile of Dr. Zahi Hawass

“The director of the Egyptian antiquities department at the Berlin museum will come (to Egypt) on December 8 to discuss the right of Egyptians to the return of the statue of Nefertiti,” Zahi Hawass told journalists on a visit to Luxor.

Hawass said the Berlin museum official “will bring evidence that the statue left Egypt through legal channels.”

“Our side will highlight documents showing the statue left in an illegal way, including ones that prove that in the allocation of antiquities discovered by a German team, (nothing) indicated the presence of a statue in the German share,” he said.

Egypt first requested its return in 1930 but successive German governments have refused.

France 24

Read also  The Nefertiti Summit: Will the Evidence Finally be Revealed?

An article in Heritage Key by Bija Knowles lists the “10 Reasons Why the Bust of Nefertiti Should Stay in the Neues Museum“. The title is not only enraging, but actually doesn’t do justice to its content, which presents favorable counter arguments on this polemic issue.

Egypt is now an independent nation with its own eminent Egyptologists, a well managed tourism industry and the resources to build a major museum to protect and display its cultural heritage.

Egypt’s claim: You took her from me when my hands were tied. Bring her back.

Germany’s excuses: The bust is too fragile for transportation, it wouldn’t be in safe hands in Egypt, Egypt is already full of antiquities, not everyone can afford to visit Egypt, keeping priceless masterpieces in one place might be dangerous in case of war or natural disasters…

Since its transfer to Germany, Nefertiti had to endure the love of a madman who kept her abducted with plans to have a bust of himself placed next to her and provoked a world war that almost wiped out the museum which housed her. More recently, this ancient icon was used as a prop for a modern German art piece. The statue was recently called a fake. And now, despite its fragility, the bust was transported from the Altes to the Neues Museum.

There are a lot of excuses but only one reason why Germany and friends think the Bust of Nefertiti should stay in Germany: Finders keepers and she makes me a lot of money.

University of British Columbia Professor Thomas Schneider  is examining the history of German Egyptology during the Nazi era.

Before Hitler’s rise to power Germany was a respected centre of Egyptology. The foreign affairs ministry financed an archaeological institute in Cairo that was used as a base to conduct scientific research.

The country’s scholars had made important contributions. To name a few examples, Adolf Erman helped unravel the grammar of Egyptian writing.Ludwig Borchardt uncovered the bust of Nefertiti and Heinrich Schäfer broke new ground in the understanding of Egyptian art.

Hitler was particularly interested in the bust of Nefertiti and vetoed its return to Cairo. The Fuhrer was planning to build a new museum in “Germania,” (his name for what would have been the transformed city of Berlin). According to Professor Schneider’s research the bust of Nefertiti would have been close to that of Hitler himself.

In 1935, Helmut Berve, a professor of ancient history at the University of Leipzig and a dedicated Nazi, questioned Egyptology’s right to exist as a discipline. He wrote: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Germany will automatically focus on the peoples akin to us in terms of race and mind; Egyptology and Assyriology will recede into the background.

Excerpted from an article by Owen Jarus for Heritage Key

The Neues Museum will once again house the archaeological collections of the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, the Museum of Pre- and Early History, as well as works from the Collection of Classical Antiquities. The most prominent feature of the exhibit, the bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, described as “the world’s most beautiful woman,” will be centrally and prominently displayed in the north cupola of the building. The bust was first exhibited at the Neues Museum in 1924 and evacuated from the structure in 1939. Additional artifacts including the burial chambers of Metjen, Merib and Manofer will also be available to view as free-standing elements.

After the re-opening of the Old National Gallery in 2001 and the Bode Museum in 2006, the Neues Museum will be the third fully restored museum building on Museum Island. This latest re-opening signifies the first time in over 70 years that all five museums on the island will be open to the public.

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The exhibits displayed at the exhibition were taken away from Germany in time of the Second World War and were kept in the State Hermitage until 1958; they were returned to the Egyptian Museum of Berlin the same year.

Three sculptural heads from the workshop of Tuthmosis created in the middle of the 14th century BC are presented at the exhibition. They are: Head of Young Nefertiti (sandstone, colouring); Head of Nefertiti as a Mature Woman (granodiorite); Head of the princess, daughter of Nefertiti and Akhenaten (sandstone), as well as Head of Amasis (grey wacke) created in the middle of the 6th century BC.

A number of temple statues that reached us from the very first years depict Akhenaten so emphatically ugly that the style was called caricatural. The king has broad feminine hips, pendulous belly, big breasts; the face is matching the body – drawn with equine lower part, long nose, exaggerated sized eyes, mouth and ears; the neck is arched unnaturally. Feminity of some features is explained by the fact that the king was depicted as Shu whose part was assigned to the son of Amenhotep III at the beginning of joint reign and Shu was hermaphrodite, however the meaning of other distortions remains unclear. In later images of Akhenaten we can see the same features but in a noticeably moderate way. Iconography of the king spread on to his followers, from his reign we got great number of images of men and women with thin ankles and heavy hips, swollen bellies, long fingers, drawn skulls and droopy chins. Unnaturalness and affectation of style is partially compensated for by dynamism of movements and wealth of details uncharacteristic for Egypt.

Hermitage Museum