A diplomatic row has reignited between Egypt and Germany over rights to a priceless 3,000-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti that has been held by a Berlin museum for decades.
The world-renowned artifact, which draws a reported one million visitors a year to Neues Museum, tops Egypt’s wishlist of pharaonic treasures removed from the Arab country during the colonial period and afterward.
Egypt claims Berlin obtained the bust by deceit and has been lobbying for its return for more than half a century.
“We ask that this unique treasure be returned to the possession of its rightful owners, the Egyptian people,” Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in a statement this week.
Berlin has flatly refused to return the artifact, claiming it is in Germany legally and too fragile to move.
“The foundation’s position on the return of Nefertiti remains unchanged,” Professor Hermann Parzinger, head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which runs Neues Museaum, said in a statement. “She is and remains the ambassador of Egypt in Berlin.”
The bust has been on display in Berlin since 1923, following its discovery more than a decade earlier by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt at Amarna
Egypt contends fraudulent documents were used to spirit it out of the country in 1912.
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