Zahi Hawass has launched a petition that has nearly 2,000 signatures to return to Egypt a bust of Queen Nefertiti, exhibited at the Neues Museum in Berlin. Several hundred thousand visitors go to the Neues Museum in Berlin, Germany, each year. Among the most revered works is this famous bust dating back several thousand years. In an interview with NBC News, the archaeologist and former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities believes that “this bust left Egypt illegally.”
A team of German archaeologists discovered this priceless painted limestone bust in 1912 in what was once the capital of Nefertiti’s husband (Pharaoh Akhenaten): Tell el-Amarna, south of Cairo.
“It’s time for him to come back to Egypt”
The work was then sent to Europe a year later, and then hidden during World War II: “Egypt deeply appreciates the care and efforts of the German government to preserve and display the 3,400-year-old painted limestone bust of the queen,” Zahi Hawass acknowledged on NBC News. After the war, the bust was moved to the Egyptian Museum in West Berlin and finally moved to the Neues Museum in 2009, in a room dedicated to it.
Cairo has been working to recover valuable historical assets for several years. In 2021, Egyptian authorities reportedly recovered more than 5,000 artifacts stolen from around the world. In January 2023, the Houston Museum of Natural Science returned another valuable asset, a wooden sarcophagus that was more than 2,000 years old, to Egypt after U.S. authorities acknowledged that the work had been stolen.
The archaeologist wants to bring this bust, a historical asset, as well as a dozen other objects back to Egypt because: “This bust, (…) without equivalent in history for its historical and aesthetic value, is in Germany, but it is time for it to return to Egypt,” he demanded this Saturday, September 7 in a press release. In 2022, a campaign to return the Dendera zodiac had collected more than 2.2 million signatures. In vain, because the object is still exhibited at the Louvre in Paris.
