She is, and remains, the ambassador of Egypt in Berlin.1
Hermann Parzinger, President of the SPK, speaking in 2011
News of the beautiful Nefertiti spread quickly beyond Germany’s borders. On 17 February 1923 The Illustrated London News displayed what it claimed to be the first image of the bust; other British publications released the same image on the same day, also claiming to be the first with the news. Nefertiti was compared favourably with portraits of Cleopatra (presumably her coins, as few authentic Cleopatras have survived) and with the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa. Suddenly aware that ‘les Boches’ had managed to acquire a great Egyptian treasure, Lacau took immediate action. He acknowledged that Borchardt had met all legal requirements, that the division had been properly documented with ‘complete and accurate lists’ and ‘good photographs’ and that the Antiquities Service was ‘defenceless, legally speaking’, yet he asked for the return of the bust on the grounds that there had obviously been a mistake in the division. Whatever Lefebvre might have thought, the carved stela in the Cairo Museum did not have the artistic or historical merit of the Nefertiti bust: ‘Isn’t it clear that the bust is by far the more important piece and that the division being vitiated by an obvious error ought to be revised?’2 Lacau approached Borchardt with a request for the return of the bust, only to be told that ownership had passed from Simon to the Neues Museum, and that the museum would not cooperate. As Borchardt blocked all further negotiation, in 1925 Lacau retaliated by stopping Borchardt from excavating until Germany either returned the bust or agreed to arbitration.
The matter was already being reported in the United Kingdom with varying degrees of accuracy in national and regional newspapers. On 22 March 1927 the Scotsman reported from Cairo that the Egyptian government had instructed their diplomatic representative in Berlin to reclaim the head, on the grounds that ‘when Professor Borchardt, the German Egyptologist, removed it from the place of its discovery at Tel el-Amarna before the war, he did not declare its value to the Egyptian Customs authorities’. The British Foreign Office, concerned that the bust might become a test case, with Egypt demanding the repatriation of other artefacts, consulted Sir Frederick Kenyon of the British Museum, who took a firm line:
It is true that such an allocation is only explicable on the grounds of gross favouritism, incompetence or corruption on the part of their staff; but that is their affair, and they must take the consequences. The only justification, to my mind, of a claim for restitution would be if any deceit or concealment were practised by the Germans … The mere argument that Egypt should have this object back because it has changed its mind is, I think, untenable, and should not be supported.3
In January 1928 the Reichstag rejected the idea that the question of the bust should go to arbitration. Nevertheless, on 4 February 1928 the Sphere referred to the Berlin Museum as ‘the present – but possibly temporary – resting-place of the great bust of … Nefertiti’. And on 13 April 1929 the same newspaper, under the headline ‘To Arrange for the Arrival of a King and the Departure of a Queen’, reported that the Egyptian Foreign Minister H. E. Hafiz Bey had arrived in Berlin to plan the visit of King Fuad, which was scheduled for May that year, and to negotiate for the return of the Nefertiti bust. King Fuad did make his planned visit, but the subject of the bust was not raised.4
Borchardt retired as director of the DOG in March 1929 and was replaced by Hermann Junker. There was a feeling on both sides that a deal might now be possible and so, in October 1929, Lacau travelled to Berlin to negotiate with Schäfer, who was now director of the Egyptian collection there. Initially Lacau suggested a straightforward swap: the bust for Lefebvre’s painted stela plus sundry objects of lesser value. But Schäfer was not happy with this suggestion. Berlin already owned a carved stela depicting the royal family sitting beneath the rays of the Aten, and he felt that there was no need for another.5 It was then proposed that in return for the Nefertiti bust, Berlin should receive two statues of acknowledged artistic and historical merit: a life-sized standing statue of the Old Kingdom high priest Ranefer and a sitting statue of the New Kingdom architect and priest Amenhotep, son of Hapu. The German Egyptologists were all agreed that this was an entirely reasonable exchange. Even without the bust, Berlin would have an exceptional Amarna display, and it would always be possible to add one of the replica busts, virtually indistinguishable from the original, that were now being created in ever increasing numbers in the Gipsformerei.
On 10 April 1930 the Scotsman was confidently reporting that ‘as soon as the consent of the Egyptian and German authorities to the proposed exchange is obtained, Nefertiti will return to the land of her birth, and Berliners will no longer be able to admire her smile in Unter den Linden’. But German public opinion, roused by the press, was very much against the deal. The people of the Weimar Republic, having recently lost their own royal family, had been happy to claim Nefertiti as their own, so that the bust now functioned as what linguist Claudia Breger has described as ‘an insignia of national identity’. She was a German queen and a German archaeological triumph, and they did not want to let her go.6 Visitor numbers rocketed, and on 8 April Der Tag was able to report that the bust had ‘received the honour of roses being laid down’ before it.7 At the last minute, the deal was called off.
Simon, as the former owner of the bust and founder of the DOG, was happy to make his own position clear. On 28 June 1930 he published an open letter in the evening edition of the Berliner Tageblatt, addressed to the Prussian Minister of Culture, Dr Grimme, reminding him that the museum’s directors had promised that the bust would be returned to Egypt should the authorities ever request it. As a businessman, he felt that this promise should now be honoured. An exchange for items of equal worth would be a sensible solution that would save face, and would allow the DOG to continue its valuable excavation work:
There are quite a few objects in our collection, which from an artistic perspective, are more important than the elegantly colourful bust of the queen. However, there are other factors that contribute to its popularity with the public. This is an image of a really beautiful woman. And it is well known … how easily the layman can confuse the beauty of the object with the value of its artistic representation. In my opinion, as far as art is concerned, one should guard against paying too much attention to public taste. Many of those who are now ranting the loudest about losing the bust have never seen it … and are only now becoming so enthusiastic about it because fashion or even sensation has led them to the Egyptian Museum …8
His letter was ignored. Angry and upset, Simon turned down his invitation to attend the opening of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum; a museum whose contents, including the remarkable blue-tiled Ishtar Gate from Babylon, bore testament to his own generosity in financing archaeological missions. This was to be his last public intervention in the matter. Borchardt’s views on the matter are unrecorded, but it may be that they are expressed in the 19,000-plus letters written between Borchardt and his wife, Emilie ‘Mimi’ Cohen Borchardt, which are currently stored, unread, in the Borchardts’ Cairo villa, now home to the Swiss Archaeological Institute.9 Borchardt had resumed his directorship of the DOG in 1923, but his excavating days were over. He died in Paris in 1938 and was buried in Cairo.
When, in October 1933, Hermann Göring, Minister of the Interior for Prussia, decided to give the Nefertiti bust to King Fuad, to commemorate the anniversary of his accession to the throne, the monarch was delighted. The German ambassador to Egypt, Eberhard von Stohrer, reports that he ‘thanked me for this good news, and asked me to convey to the President, the Reich, Hindenburg, and the German government, his sincere thanks’. Adolf Hitler, however, was far from delighted, and personally intervened to block Nefertiti’s return. More than a decade after the event, von Stohrer recalled Hitler’s thoughts on Nefertiti:
Oh, these Egyptologists and these professors! I don’t attach any value to their appraisals. I know this famous bust. I have viewed it and admired it many times … It is a unique masterpiece, a jewel, a real treasure … Do you know what I am going to do one day? I am going to build a new Egyptian Museum in Berlin; I dream that there I will create a hall topped by a dome, where alone, in the middle, this marvel will be placed. And for that reason, I will not renounce the queen’s head.10
Hitler had an interest in Akhenaten’s religion, which he saw as a form of pagan monotheism, associating the king with ideas of progress and a refusal to be bound by the past. There was something appealing about the ideal of a healthy life lived beneath the sun’s rays and, while Akhenaten’s appearance was not entirely comfortable for someone who appreciated the physically perfect, Nefertiti’s bust fitted well with models of European health and beauty. Women could relate to Nefertiti and men could admire her. Nevertheless, Nefertiti made an unlikely role model for Nazi Germany.11
New York’s Jewish Daily Bulletin picked up on this anomaly. Its edition published on 26 April 1934 makes grim reading. Page 1 has a brief article on the Nazi ‘Race Fleet’; two hundred doctors who were to tour Germany explaining ‘racial science’ were given a sendoff hosted by the Society for Racial Hygiene, an organisation dedicated to achieving racial ‘purity’ through selective reproduction and sterilisation. Page 3 reports ‘the Ku Klux Klan riding again: Jews and Catholics are objects of their malignant activities’. On page 6 in the Bulletin’s Day Book, we find an article on Nefertiti, or rather the Berlin bust version of Nefertiti:
Was Queen Nefertiti, dusky Egyptian beauty who shared the throne of the land of the pyramids, ‘Aryan’? The question has stirred a lively dispute in one of the London newspapers after the Queen broke into print for having snared Adolf Hitler’s heart … Not so long ago the Egyptian government, which is now intent on preserving for Egypt the relics of that land’s past, requested the return of the bust for inclusion in the magnificent collection at Cairo. Herr Hitler, it is reported, does not wish Queen Nefertiti to leave Berlin because, in his own words, he is in love with her.
In London’s Daily Telegraph, the letters column was divided over whether Nefertiti had the power to conquer Hitler’s heart, ‘vincit omnia amor’, or whether, as some robustly maintained, Nefertiti was actually an Aryan princess. Many considered her name to be a vital clue to her origins. ‘Nefertiti’ – literally ‘A Beautiful Woman has Come’ – was not a particularly unusual name in ancient Egypt. It is likely to be a reference to arrival of the goddess Hathor. As Nefertiti appears wearing a Hathoric crown in the Theban Benben Temple, we may speculate that she adopted an appropriate name at the time of her marriage, in the same way than modern monarchs sometimes choose new names at the time of their coronation. But in the 1930s there was an assumption that the name referred to the arrival of the queen herself; that she had quite literally arrived at court as a beautiful woman, to marry Akhenaten. ‘Nefertiti’ would then be a replacement for an unpronounceable foreign name. Although there is no evidence for the arrival of a foreign bride at the start of Akhenaten’s reign, the harem that he inherited from his father did house several age-appropriate princesses. The most likely of these was Tadukhepa, daughter of Tushratta of Mitanni. Tadukhepa had been sent to Egypt to marry Amenhotep III but her arrival coincided with the death of her elderly bridegroom. We know that she remained in Egypt to marry Akhenaten, but from this point on she disappears from view. On the basis of this very flimsy evidence, many accepted that Nefertiti must be Tadukhepa.
Nefertiti was not the only Amarna queen to be identified as non-Egyptian. When, in 1912, John Player and Co. produced a set of twenty-five ‘Egyptian Kings and Queens and Classical Deities’ cigarette cards, the collection included King Amenophis (Amenhotep III) and his consort, ‘Queen Amenophis’ (Queen Tiy). The queen, seen in profile wearing the vulture headdress, a golden collar and a somewhat un-Egyptian looking green dress, is described as being ‘of Asiatic origin … she was blue eyed and of very fair complexion and tenderly loved by her husband’. Her cartouche was rendered correctly, and the names of her parents were given more or less correctly as ‘Juas and Tuaa’. Nefertiti, a virtual unknown at this time, did not merit a cigarette card.12 The idea that Tiy was a blue-eyed blonde from Mitanni had been developed by Petrie, who based his conclusions on her physiognomy and felt confident enough in his analysis to declare that ‘The source then of this [Akhenaten’s] peculiar face is the Mitannian blood of his mother Thyi.’13 The discovery of the entirely Egyptian tomb of Tiy’s parents, Yuya and Thuyu, in the Valley of the Kings in 1905 should have put an end to this idea.14 But no one told John Player and Co., and so the misinformation continued to spread.
If Tiy had been an Aryan princess married to an Egyptian king, Akhenaten himself would have been half-Aryan. As the aforementioned Jewish Daily Bulletin pointed out, that would not have been enough to satisfy Hitler:
This is an impossible state of affairs. If Herr Hitler is going to admit publicly his love for a woman of doubtful ‘Aryanism’ who remained married to a ‘half Aryan’ (which, to all Nazi intents, is ‘non-Aryan’) he condones the same failing in his ‘Aryan’ subjects. What’s good for the Führer is good for the follower. We logically expect, therefore, an end to this agitation against marriage between ‘Aryans’ and ‘non-Aryans’ and the issuance of instructions from the Brown House to the German cupid that he may once again shoot his arrows where he will without first referring to Dr Achim Gercke and his racial records of approval of his targets.
But this seemed all wrong:
Well, this department looked at a photograph of Queen Nefertiti but perhaps because we haven’t had the training that Herr Hitler’s race detection department has had, it didn’t clarify matters. The Queen (from the photograph) is a robust, Semitic-looking woman who, if dressed in modern clothes and with a modified head-dress, might be a resident of West End Avenue and a member of the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress.
The Amarna artefacts remained on display until, in August 1939, with war imminent, the Berlin Museums were forced to close. The precious collections were packed up and transferred to secure locations in monasteries, castles, mines and tunnels. This was to prove a wise precaution. All the buildings on Museum Island were to suffer war damage, with more than a third of the Neues Museum being destroyed during a Royal Air Force raid in 1943. The bust, stored in a crate labelled THE COLOURFUL QUEEN, was moved first to the vault of the Prussian Governmental Bank and then, in 1941, to a flak bunker near Berlin zoo. Finally, shortly before the Red Army took Berlin in 1945, the bust was hidden ‘by order of the Führer’ alongside Germany’s gold and currency reserves in a salt mine at Merkers-Kieselbach in Thuringia.15 When, five months later, the mine was captured by the Allied forces, the bust passed to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives branch of the US Army. It was sent first to the Reichsbank in Frankfurt, and then to the US Central Collection Point in Wiesbaden, which was headed by the trained architect Captain Walter I. Farmer. Farmer prided himself on treating the objects in his care with appropriate reverence and respect, protecting them from the curious and guarding them from damage. He was therefore horrified to learn that, in December 1945, while he was on leave in England, the crate containing the head had been opened specifically against his instructions:
Even today I have no clear explanation of what happened. One story is that Joe Kelleher [Captain Patrick J. Kelleher] had arranged a dinner party and afterwards for entertainment had offered his guests a thrilling experience. They were given a private showing of the famous portrait bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. Despite my orders as director of the Collecting Point that none of the Berlin Museum crates should ever be opened without my authorisation, Joe Kelleher had ordered the well sealed box to be opened. Frau Hobirk, of the German staff, was called in to lift her out; if she fell an American would not be at fault … When I confronted Kelleher with my knowledge that the box had been opened he swore that he had been ordered by two generals to open it for their inspection.16
Subsequently this story mutated into the rumour that the Americans had unpacked the bust to raise a glass to Nefertiti on Christmas Day. Farmer strongly objected to this story: ‘Nefertiti was indeed a queen, and while she was our guest should have been shown every regal courtesy.’ Liberated from her protective crate, Nefertiti became something of a liability, as increasing numbers of visitors started to drop by and ask for a glimpse of the famous queen. This may have prompted Farmer’s decision to hold an exhibition of German-owned artefacts, designed to reassure the German people that the Americans were looking after their treasures properly. In 1946 the Nefertiti bust went on public display in Wiesbaden.
That same year saw a request for the repatriation of the bust, addressed by the Egyptian government to the Allied Control Commission in Germany, reminding them that the previous return of the bust had been thwarted only by Hitler, who had declared that the bust would never be returned because ‘il en était amoureux’.17 With Hitler defeated, there was no reason not to right an historic wrong. A copy of this request was sent by the Egyptian ambassador to the British Foreign Office, who responded that they could do nothing to intervene in the matter. The Metropolitan Museum felt that perhaps the bust could be sent via New York to Egypt, where it could be displayed as restitution for damage caused during the war. It is due largely to Farmer’s intervention that the Americans rejected this plan and refused the repatriation of the bust, on the grounds that they could only repatriate objects looted during the war. This was a legal matter between the Egyptians and the Germans, and ‘it is assumed that, subsequent to the re-establishment of a competent German government, this case may be brought to the attention of such government’.18
The Wiesbaden Collection Point was responsible for the collecting, cataloguing and returning the artworks stored by the Nazis. By December 1950 some 340,846 items – an item in some cases being an entire library – had been returned to the countries from which they had been taken, while many thousands still awaited processing.19 The artefacts from the Berlin Museums presented a particular problem as, following the collapse of the Reich, Berlin had become a divided city. In 1956 the Nefertiti bust was sent not to the Neues Museum but to West Berlin. It was exhibited first in the Dahlem Museum before moving, in 1967, to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Here, almost overnight, the bust, isolated from its original environment and dislocated from much of the Berlin Egyptology collection, became a symbol for isolated West Berlin. Meanwhile the German Democratic Republic tried to claim the bust on the grounds that its former home, the Neues Museum on Museum Island, was located in East Berlin. This bitter dispute only ended in 1990, when the Berlin wall fell and the two Germanys became one.
Following reunification, the Nefertiti bust was temporarily displayed in the Altes Museum as ‘Master Plan Museum Island’ – the complete restoration of the Island as a modern complex suitable for the needs of modern visitors – got underway. The Neues Museum, originally designed by Friedrich Auguste Stüler and now re-envisaged by David Chipperfield, reopened in 2009. Today the Nefertiti bust is once again its star exhibit. Outside the museum, Nefertiti now symbolises the united Berlin, and her bust has featured on stamps, postcards and billboards, often with her missing eye restored. There have been repeated requests for her return to Egypt – in 1984, for example, the Nefertiti Wants to Go Home movement, led by Herbert Ganslmayr and Gert von Paczensky, suggested that the bust be displayed alternately in Cairo and Berlin, while in 2005 Egypt appealed to UNESCO to resolve the dispute – but the German authorities have stood firm.
The question of whether Western institutions should return foreign works of art and antiquity seized, purchased or otherwise obtained under what today may be classified as imperialist conditions is one that haunts many museums. It is a question fraught with complexity.20 The originating countries usually want some, if not all, of their ‘plundered’ treasures to be returned, while the museums wish to retain ‘their’ collections intact, see the treasures as belonging to the world rather than to one country, and fear that even one return might set a dangerous precedent.
In the case of obviously stolen works, almost everyone is in agreement. Reputable museums will not willingly acquire or display non-provenanced artefacts, and if an artefact is identified as stolen it will be returned without argument to its legal owner.21 Nefertiti’s bust was not, however, obviously stolen. It was acquired in accordance with then current Egyptian law as part of a legitimate division of finds, and its legal owner has been, since 1957, the SPK. Many would agree that its acquisition was opportunistic to say the least, and that the Antiquities Service represented by Lefebvre was negligent, but it is difficult to argue that it was illegal unless it is also argued that Borchardt, with deliberate intent, was able to exert such undue influence over Lefebvre as to make the division void.
Lefebvre’s decision to reject the Nefertiti bust had no obvious effect on his career. Following the Great War he became assistant curator at the Cairo Museum before replacing Pierre Lacau on his retirement in 1926. When Lacau asked questions about the division, Lefebvre prudently stated that he could not remember whether or not he had seen the bust.22 We therefore have to guess what went through his mind during what to us seems to have been a momentous event, but what was for him simply another day at the office. Although we know that Lefebvre was charged with selecting the finds that the Antiquities Service wished to retain, we do not know the grounds on which he was expected to made his selection. As a linguist, he may have been on the look-out for inscribed pieces that would untangle some of the complexities of the Amarna Period. The Nefertiti bust was an ideal, crowd-pleasing museum piece, but it lacked the inscriptions that would have advanced understanding. The unusual decoration may have seemed gaudy and brash to eyes more accustomed to unpainted stone, while its missing eye marked the bust as broken or incomplete. As the Cairo Museum already had a sizeable collection of royal heads, Lefebvre may have felt that to add the unlabelled bust of an unremarkable queen to the collection was unnecessary. The painted and inscribed stone stela, on the other hand, was an object of beauty in its own right, and one that did promise a deeper understanding of the Amarna Period.
To many, Lefebvre’s failure to select Nefertiti for Egypt is so inexplicable that it cannot have been the result of indifference or incompetence. There must have been trickery or outright criminality involved. Claims that Borchardt misappropriated the Nefertiti bust have been rife, and so well publicised that even in Germany many people unthinkingly accept that it was stolen. The bust regularly appears on lists of looted artefacts in popular publications and so here, for example, included at number five on the Guardian newspaper’s list of ‘the 10 most notorious looted artworks’, we find:
Limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti, c 1345, by the sculptor Thutmose. While he was digging at Amarna in 1912, the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt discovered this bust and stole it. Under the established procedure of ‘partage’ he was meant to declare all items to an official of the Antiquities Service in Tell el Amarna, so a fair split could be made. But he did not declare her.23
The more sensational claims – that the bust was smuggled out of Egypt in a basket of fruit, or that it was disguised below a thick layer of clay that rendered it unrecognisable – can be rejected as they contradict the known facts. Lacau was happy to accept that the division had been conducted appropriately, and that his representative had made a simple error. Borchardt himself always maintained to his own family that the bust was properly obtained.24 Güterbock, our helpful eyewitness, summarises the situation from the dig director’s perspective:
Nefertiti’s bust has not at all been hidden from the representative of the Egyptian Administration of Antiquities; it was shown to him in photograph 18/24, and subsequently he was shown the original. In the protocol of the division, it is listed at the top as No. 1.25
So far so well but, as he concedes: ‘No excavator is obliged to almost point out the beauty of his finds.’26 It seems that Borchardt, while obeying the letter of the law, did not take it upon himself to make Lefebvre’s job easy, and there is one area where his behaviour invites our scrutiny. The official division protocol, written in French, listed the head as ‘Buste en plâtre peinte d’une princesse de la famille royale’ [Bust in painted plaster of a princess of the royal family]. It is not clear who created this description, but it contains two major errors. The fact that Nefertiti is listed as a princess rather than a queen is odd, but this distinction would have meant less in 1913 than it does today. The fact that the bust is listed as being made of plaster is more significant. The outer layer of the bust is, indeed, gypsum or plaster; its core, however, is limestone. It is possible that the piece was deliberately misdescribed because Lefebvre had agreed in advance of the division that all the plaster heads should go to Germany; as it turned out, Lefebvre was also content to allow the stone heads to leave Egypt. Why Lefebvre thought it acceptable to reject the plaster heads en bloc – some of the most poignant and potentially informative pieces of art ever to be recovered from the dynastic age – is rarely questioned.
The misdirection/mistake in the protocol, and the fact that Lefebvre was shown the Amarna artefacts under far from ideal conditions, suggest that Borchardt was guilty of hoping to retain the bust for his German patron. However, this does not shift the responsibility for the decision from Lefebvre. As the representative of the Antiquities Service, it was his duty to examine all finds properly, in a good light, and then make his selection. If he did rely on the excavator’s notes and photographs, if he failed to make a thorough examination of each and every artefact, and if he failed to realise that a dig director might not necessarily display everything in the best possible light, he failed in his duty. This would be unfortunate, but it would not make the division illegal. Nevertheless, this evidence has been used to argue for the return of the bust. In January 2011 Dr Zahi Hawass, then head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (the former Antiquities Service) under the Mubarak government, issued a formal request for Nefertiti’s return. Citing Article 33(b) of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (1970), he argued that ‘this request is a natural consequence of Egypt’s long-standing policy of seeking the restitution of all archaeological artefacts that have been taken illicitly out of the country’. As the request had not been signed by the Egyptian prime minister, the German authorities did not consider it to be an official repatriation request, and turned it down. The Arab Spring brought this discussion to an abrupt end, but it has continued sporadically under successive regimes.
If Germany has a strong legal case to support its ownership of the bust, the moral case is far less clear. Is it ever right that one country should own another country’s cultural assets? To the Egyptians, Nefertiti’s bust has become a symbol of a lost – or stolen – heritage, seized at a time when Egypt was helpless under foreign rule. That the bust has the power to provoke powerful reactions in Egypt can be seen by the immediate, media-fuelled, response to the massive, ill-crafted replica that was, in 2015, erected on a roundabout at the entrance to the city of Samalut. Twitter was quick to dub the image ‘an insult to Nefertiti and to every Egyptian’, and comparisons were drawn with Frankenstein’s monster. The statue had to be withdrawn after a few days, to be replaced by a dove of peace.
To the Germans, Nefertiti’s post-Amarna adventures are a valid part of her history that cannot be erased by returning her to Egypt. It is her sojourn in Germany that has made Nefertiti the celebrity that she is today, and Egypt actively benefits from her presence in Berlin, where she acts as an ambassador, promoting Egypt and creating understanding and respect for cultural diversity. Hermann Parzinger, president of the SPK, has summarised this view: ‘Nefertiti is part of humanity’s cultural heritage. I fundamentally do not think that restituting the bust simply for generosity’s sake is justifiable.’27 Economically, the Berlin Museum certainly benefits from the tourists who queue to see the bust. Does Egypt then benefit from those same tourists, who decide to visit Nefertiti’s homeland? In the Cairo Museum, alongside the golden treasures of Tutankhamen and the silver treasures of Tanis, Nefertiti’s aura would surely diminish. But in Egypt she would be accessible to at least some of the Egyptian people who currently cannot see her.
In 2003 Little Warsaw’s installation The Body of Nefertiti led to a new demand for the bust’s return. This was less a legal or moral argument than a cultural one. To the Egyptian authorities, the Germans were endangering the safety of a priceless artefact and, more importantly, treating their queen with the utmost disrespect by allowing her to participate in a trivial artistic experiment. To the German authorities, the Egyptians were expressing the view that Nefertiti should be placed in a sterile cultural vacuum which would exclude her from the modern world. Stephen K. Urice, an expert in cultural property law, has summed up this argument:
What Egypt’s reaction to The Body of Nefertiti makes clear, is that a return of the bust to Egypt would place it out of the reach of contemporary artists such as Little Warsaw. The bust holds absolutely no place in current Egyptian religious practice and no appreciable use in developing or maintaining current Egyptian national identity. Were it to be returned to Egypt, it would likely be isolated from the stream of creative expression to which it can contribute and from which it can derive new meaning. To condemn the bust to such an existence is … to assure that the bust remain forever-more beautiful but dead.28
Urice is here responding to a request that he and fellow legal expert Kurt G. Siehr should take opposing positions on the question of whether the Nefertiti bust should remain in Berlin or be returned to Egypt. As Siehr makes clear ‘As lawyers, both of us might have argued either position.’29
As early as 1927 Arthur Weigall had raised the subject of the bust’s safety should it be returned to Egypt:
The German scholars of the Berlin Museum are probably better trained than are their French, English and Egyptian confrères who manage the Cairo Museum; and Berlin is a city perhaps less liable to a destructive upheaval than is the Egyptian capital.30
Weigall, lacking the gift of foresight, was entirely wrong in regarding the Neues Museum as a more secure environment than its Cairene counterpart. But he was asking a question that others have since raised. Does it makes sense to put all of ancient Egypt’s archaeological eggs into one basket that a fire, an earthquake or sudden civil unrest could entirely destroy? The 2011 Arab Spring saw the plundering of the Cairo Museum gift shop, which was apparently mistaken for the actual museum, and the loss and subsequent recovery of some of Tutankhamen’s grave goods from the museum itself. This has encouraged many to see the West as the protector of some of Egypt’s heritage. Hawass’s suggestion that Nefertiti might be displayed in the new Akhenaten Museum in Minya, close to her original Amarna home, might avoid this problem. But Middle Egypt is desperately short of tourists and, since the neighbouring Malawi Museum was ransacked and torched during the Arab Spring, many consider it to be dangerously insecure.
As I write, Egypt is asking that the Nefertiti bust be returned to Egypt on loan for the opening of Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, which is scheduled for 2018. This is a repeat request; in 2007, Hawass asked that the bust be returned for three months to feature at the opening of the museum, which was then scheduled for 2011. The German authorities have always declared the bust too fragile to travel. Hawass has responded by suggesting that the bust be examined by an independent panel of experts:
Given the immeasurable delight and pride which this object could bring to the Egyptians who have never had the opportunity to see it, it seems that a thorough and impartial evaluation by a scientific committee is called for to be sure that every possible scenario for its safe display in Egypt has been exhausted before our request for [its] loan is denied. We would never endanger any of our treasures by insisting that they travel against the advice of an impartial commission of experts. However, we do maintain that the evaluation of these objects should be carried out by a balanced and diverse international committee, including experts from Egypt and from other non-Western nations.31
It seems unlikely, given Egypt’s often-declared view that the Nefertiti bust is stolen property, that the Germans will ever consider it fit to travel. As Hawass has stated: ‘They fear it will be like Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we will take it and not give it back.’32