A 3200-year-old statue of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses the II stands in the entrance hall of the Grand Egyptian Museum. Photo / Supplied
When Monica Hanna first visited Berlin in 2007, even before checking into her hotel, she rushed to the Altes Museum to visit Nefertiti.
The Egyptian archaeology graduate student was eager to see the legendary nearly 3400-year-old bust of the 14th-century BC pharaonic queen - her painted hues of red, blue, yellow and black remarkably preserved, her lips curved into a faint smile, her serene gaze fixed ahead.
“I was very emotional,” Hanna recalled. “I felt, how come she’s here? She’s in the wrong place.”
Nearly two decades later, Hanna is one of two prominent Egyptian archaeologists leading campaigns for the bust to be returned to Egypt, 112 years after it was first taken to Berlin.
It’s the largest effort to date to bring Nefertiti back to her homeland.
German museum authorities are hardly eager to hand over one of the country’s most famous artifacts, which draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year to Berlin’s Neues Museum, where it’s been displayed since 2009.
There have been various attempts in the past century to get the bust sent back to Egypt.
They almost bore fruit under the Nazis, when Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, Hermann Goring, reportedly argued that repatriating the bust could win Egyptian backing for Germany - but Hitler refused to give up what he called “a true treasure”.
Subsequent attempts at restitution haven’t gained much traction.
There’s one major difference now: the opening last month of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, a world-class facility decades in the making.
Advocates of repatriation say the museum should encompass the full sweep of Egypt’s archaeological heritage and is incomplete without some of the country’s most heralded artifacts.
They also see it as a gleaming rebuttal to the old argument that Egypt’s treasures are better protected, preserved and displayed outside the country.
“The countries that refused to send us our artifacts said, ‘Why should we send you our artifacts? You have bad museums,’” said archaeologist Dr Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former antiquities minister, who is leading his own petition drive to repatriate the bust.
Now it’s not clear that Europe’s museums are safer, he said, pointing to recent thefts of artifacts from London’s British Museum and the October jewellery heist at the Louvre in Paris.
“You cannot say that Egypt cannot protect its artifacts,” Hawass said. “There is no museum that has the quality of display of the Grand Museum.”
The original Egyptian museum, located in the heart of downtown Cairo, was more than a century old and notorious for its poor lighting, lack of explanation and the generally dubious level of its curation.
The quality of the new museum - located just outside Cairo - is beside the point, said Friederike Seyfried, director of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, which oversees the collection that includes the bust of Nefertiti under the umbrella of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.
Her institution, like many others, is unwilling to take the risk of transporting such a valuable and delicate object.
“The issue is transportation,” she said.
“It’s not the conditions at the partner museum … Even if museums anywhere in the world offer the best conditions ever, when they request it, all I can say is, ‘You know I can’t lend it. It’s impossible. It’s too fragile.’”
The bust was brought to Germany in accordance with the laws at the time, Seyfried said, and any discussions about restitution would occur on a political level.
She is not aware of any current conversations at the Foreign Ministry about returning the bust, she said.
The German and Egyptian foreign ministries did not respond to requests for comment.
An Egyptian official said the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities set up a department in 2011 dedicated to retrieving artifacts illegally taken out of the country, and that this year, it has succeeded in retrieving dozens of smuggled artifacts from countries including Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium.
“Egypt is committed to retrieving its national treasures from all around the world and bringing them home,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
The exact circumstances surrounding the Nefertiti bust’s extraction to Germany remain contested.
What’s clear is that in 1912, a team led the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt found the bust at the archaeological site of Tell el-Amarna, about 320km south of Cairo. A legal framework under Egypt’s British colonial authorities established a 50-50 rule, by which the archaeologists were supposed to split their finds with Egypt.
Borchardt kept the bust as the loot was divided, and advocates of repatriation say he concealed its true nature and value from the French antiquities administrator who was in charge of enforcing the arrangement.
There is evidence that Borchardt’s party held a solemn farewell ceremony for the bust, assuming they’d have to give it up, and it was kept out of public view for a decade after being taken to Germany.
“The bust came to Germany legally - that is, in accordance with the laws of the time,” said Sebastian Conrad, a German historian and author of a book on the Nefertiti bust.
“The moral and normative question hinges on whether one considers the laws of that era ethical - whether one considers the laws of that time, which arose under imperial conditions, to be laws that would still be morally enforceable today.”
To Hawass, the answer to that question is easy: European colonial powers plundered Egypt’s artifacts without the consent of the Egyptians themselves.
“These countries raped the Nile,” said Hawass, who is also circulating petitions for the return of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum and the Dendera Zodiac from the Louvre. “It’s time to give us back something.”
Hawass said his petition for the Nefertiti bust has more than 200,000 signatures so far, and he’s hoping to reach a million.
Hanna, who is likewise pushing for the Rosetta Stone’s return, did not share the number of signatures she has obtained.
But getting the Germans to give up what Conrad calls “the heart of Berlin’s museum landscape” will be an uphill battle.
It doesn’t help that the two petition drives are operating in competition.
Hawass is a controversial figure for his work with autocratic former president Hosni Mubarak. Hanna called him “corrupt” and said he initiated his restitution campaign “just to be in the media”.
Hawass, by contrast, says his campaign has official backing, since Egypt’s prime minister gave him permission to formally request the bust’s return from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 2011.
The political climate around repatriation may be working in the Egyptians’ favour.
Around the world, cultural institutions have begun returning stolen artifacts and remains.
In 2022, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation began returning its Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, 125 years after British forces looted the artifacts. Last month, 12 Ethiopian artifacts were returned after being held by a German family for over a century.
Still, Nefertiti is different. For one thing, some of the other artifacts were clearly stolen illegally or violently. The bust is also far more famous than these returned items.
Nefertiti is Germany’s Mona Lisa, illuminated by a skylight in her own domed room, decorated with faded frescoes. The website of the Berlin State Museums describes her as “the undisputed star” of the Neues Museum.
The bust’s fans include singer Beyonce, who in 2018 headlined Coachella in a Nefertiti-inspired costume and visited the artifact.
On a December afternoon, reverent visitors from around the world paid silent tribute to the queen.
“I didn’t expect to be so moved when I stood in front of this,” said Berlin resident Philipp Seipelt, 43, who came to the museum to see the bust. He understands the arguments for repatriation but said, “It would be a shame for Berlin not to be able to see it”.
“I’d rather have it here,” said Arvin Aguda, 34, visiting from Miami, the United States. “The political climate in Egypt is too much right now.”
“It’s very well protected,” agreed his wife, Nina, 33.
Elvis Gugg, 68, who travelled from Austria, said he understands that “this is part of Egypt’s cultural heritage”. But he said returning it to Egypt “would open Pandora’s box” of restitution campaigns for famous artifacts across Europe.
His wife, Karin, 63, struggled to describe the bust’s powerful effect on her as tears came to her eyes.
The bust’s fame makes it “a harder fight”, Hanna concedes. She doesn’t think repatriation will happen in the next year, but maybe in the next decade.
“I hope I’m still alive to see it happen,” said Hanna, whose parents are from Minya, the present-day location of Tell el-Amarna, where Nefertiti reigned. She added: “I always felt that she’s an estranged great-grandmother of mine who was taken forcefully”.
Nefertiti is likewise always on Hawass’ mind; he keeps a reproduction of the bust in his office. Unlike Hanna, he has never visited the original in Berlin.
“I refuse to go and see the bust of Nefertiti at all,” he said. “This bust should be in Egypt, and I will bring it to Egypt.”
Nefertiti was the principal wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, known for his experiment in monotheism and the worship of the sun disk Aten, to the exclusion of Egypt’s other gods.
Few details of her life are known, but thanks to the bust, she has become a symbol of both beauty and female empowerment.
Her name translates roughly to “the beautiful one has come.” For Egyptian archaeologists, that remains an aspiration.
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