Nefertiti Bust: Who Owns the Most Famous Face of Egypt?

Around 500,000 people visit a limestone bust, 48 centimeters tall and weighing 20 kilograms, in Berlin's Neues Museum each year. It shows Nefertiti, the wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten, and it is about 3,300 years old. Her face has ended up on postcards, stamps, and election posters. And since 1924, the year the Berliners first showed her to the public, Egypt has been demanding her back.

On 1 November 2026, the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum near Giza will be one year old, and its 2025 opening has reignited the dispute. Behind it lies a question that can't be answered in one sentence: was the bust divided lawfully in 1913, or was Egypt deceived?

In short: the bust was found on 6 December 1912 in Amarna and came to Berlin in 1913 through a division of finds. Whether that division was honest is still the core of the dispute, and both sides appeal to the same document. The Neues Museum and the German government consider the acquisition lawful, Egypt considers it unethical or fraudulent.

On 6 December 1912, an excavation of the German Oriental Society at Amarna came across the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose. The team was led by the archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt and paid for by the Berlin merchant James Simon, one of the richest men in Prussia, who exported more than 20,000 objects from Egypt and Iraq. Among unfinished heads lay the bust. Borchardt noted in his diary that they suddenly had the most alive Egyptian artwork in their hands, that it couldn't be put into words, one had to see it.

The bust consists of a limestone core with painted stucco layers. The face is almost entirely intact, but the left eye lacks the inlay the right one has (a quartz set in wax). It bears no inscription but is recognized by the blue cap crown that Nefertiti also wears in labeled depictions. "Nefertiti" means "the beautiful one has come." She was the chief wife of Akhenaten, who reigned from 1352 to 1336 BC, and had six daughters, one of whom was married to Tutankhamun.

At the time, a division system applied: the finds of an excavation were divided between Egypt and the excavators. On 20 January 1913, Borchardt met a senior Egyptian official to divide the finds of 1912. A document from the archive of the German Oriental Society from 1924, whose author was present, records that Borchardt "wanted to save the bust for us," that is, for Germany.

What happened at the division, the two sides tell differently. Egypt says: Borchardt showed the French chief inspector of the antiquities service, Gustave Lefebvre, a photograph of the bust "that didn't show Nefertiti in her best light," and the bust lay in a box in a poorly lit room. It is unknown whether Lefebvre took it out. Borchardt also wrongly claimed it was made of gypsum, not limestone. The German Oriental Society says in contrast: the finds were divided fairly, Nefertiti was at the top of the exchange list, and the inspector could have looked at everything closely.

The bust came to Berlin in 1913 and was handed to James Simon, who displayed it in his house. In the same year he lent it to the Berlin museum, together with other finds from Amarna. While the other pieces were exhibited in 1913 and 1914, the bust was kept secret at Borchardt's wish, and in 1918 the museum discussed an exhibition, again postponed at Borchardt's request. In 1920, Simon donated it to the museum, in 1923 Borchardt revealed it in his writings, and in 1924 the public saw it for the first time in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin.

The bust became a sensation and the flagship of the Berlin museums. Egypt noticed it immediately: since the unveiling in 1924, Egyptian authorities have demanded its return. Why the bust stayed secret from 1913 to 1924, the sources do not explain. What is documented is only that it happened at Borchardt's wish. The forgery theorists discussed below saw in it a sign that something was wrong, an explanation that science has refuted. The secrecy is not proof in either direction.

Until 1939, the bust stood in the Neues Museum on Berlin's Museum Island. With the outbreak of war, the museums were emptied. It lay first in the cellar of the Prussian State Bank, in autumn 1941 it was moved to the Zoo Tower flak bunker in Berlin, the Neues Museum was bombed by the Royal Air Force in 1943, and on 6 March 1945 it went to a salt mine at Merkers-Kieselbach in Thuringia.

There the US Army found it in March 1945 and handed it to its monuments branch. It went to the Reichsbank in Frankfurt and in August to the American collecting point in Wiesbaden, where it was on public display from 1946 and stayed ten years. In 1956 it went to the Dahlem Museum in West Berlin, in 1967 to the Egyptian Museum in Charlottenburg, in 2005 to the Altes Museum, and in October 2009 it returned as the centerpiece to the reopened Neues Museum. As early as 1946, East Germany also demanded it for Museum Island in East Berlin.

In 1925, Egypt threatened to ban German excavations in the country unless the bust was returned. In 1929 it offered to exchange it for other pieces, Germany declined. In 1933, Hermann Göring considered returning it to the Egyptian King Fuad I as a political gesture, Hitler refused and promised to build a new Egyptian museum for Nefertiti. After 1945, Egypt asked the US for the bust, which referred it to the new German authorities. In 1989, President Mubarak called Nefertiti in Berlin "Egypt's best ambassador."

In 2005, Zahi Hawass, then Egypt's chief antiquities official, asked UNESCO for help. In 2007, Germany refused to lend it for a three-month exhibition in Egypt, on the grounds that the bust was too fragile. In 2011, Egypt formally requested its return, and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation held to its position. In September 2024, Hawass started a petition that reached nearly 10,000 signatures within a month. He demands only three objects: the bust, the Rosetta Stone, and the Dendera Zodiac, other pieces that legally left the country he doesn't want back.

Egypt accuses Borchardt of wrapping the bust to conceal its value and smuggling it out of the country. As evidence, it points to the fact that it was listed in the find lists as a painted plaster bust of a princess, while Borchardt wrote clearly of the head of Nefertiti in his diary. Hawass said Borchardt described it this way so that his country would get the statue, that he acted unethically and with intent to deceive. But he did not call the bust looted and said the decision lies with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the German culture minister.

Berlin points to the protocol of the division, signed by the German excavators and the French-led Egyptian antiquities service. The Neues Museum writes that the Egyptian side at that time chose the stele of Akhenaten and his family, the German side the Nefertiti figure. The German government also cites the fragility of the bust, possible precedents, and a lack of legal basis, as today's international rules did not exist in 1913. According to The Times, Germany fears a loan could mean its permanent departure. The Egyptian archaeologist Monica Hanna disagrees with the view of the bust as an "ambassador."

In 2009, the Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin claimed the bust was a forgery, perhaps by Borchardt himself, to test ancient pigments. As arguments he cited the missing left eye, which would have been disrespectful in Egypt, the first scientific reports only in 1923, and that the limestone core was never dated. The Berlin author Erdogan Ercivan suspected Borchardt's wife had been the model, and another theory spoke of a production on Hitler's orders in the 1930s.

Science sees it differently. Friedrich Rathgen examined the pigments as early as 1923, their composition matches the 18th Dynasty, and ETH Zurich confirmed this in 1982. A CT scan of 2006 under Alexander Huppertz showed a wrinkled face in the core that the outer stucco layer smooths over, which according to Huppertz may reflect the aesthetic ideals of the time. The then museum director Dietrich Wildung called the forgery claims a publicity stunt. The missing left eye others explain by the bust being a workshop model on which the master showed his pupils how to build the eye. Hawass, by contrast, thinks Thutmose made the eye and it was later destroyed.

To wrap up, the short version, so fact and story don't blur.

Nefertiti shows that an object carries several stories. That's why every season in HistoryBytes is split into five categories, and this story touches all five: Ludwig Borchardt as a person, Amarna as a place, the find of 6 December 1912 and the division of 20 January 1913 as events, the question of return as an idea, the bust as an object. That's how the Pharaos of Egypt season builds the whole picture of a world in which an artwork still makes politics 3,300 years later.

In Egypt, Nefertiti was a queen, in Berlin she is an icon. Her face advertises the capital's museums and stands for a country's claim to its heritage. Whether she returns to Giza, stays in Berlin, or one day will be seen in both cities isn't decided by history but by politics. What history delivers is a document of 20 January 1913 that two sides read in opposite ways. Whoever reads it for themselves finds that both sides hold parts of the truth, and that the whole truth got lost in the space between the box and the photograph.