Egypt to prove Germany stole Nefertiti bust

Over the past few days, various news outlets have been carrying stories about a new (?) fuss brewing about the Nefertiti bust (AFP):

Egypt will soon provide evidence that the 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti was taken illegally out of the country by Germany, Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Sunday. "We are still gathering information, but I expect we will shortly have enough to place a formal request to the Berlin Museum for the return of the bust," Hawass told the Tagesspiegel in an interview”.

I suspect this is nothing more than an extension of the news story covered here a few weeks back. If so this seems more likely to be aimed at public opinion than building a case to be solved by international law. One wonders whether this type of posing and strutting is not ultimately harmful. Eternally playing the victim does not do the wider cause any good. Sure, lots of antiquities left Egypt under highly dubious and regretable circumstances, this bust perhaps being one of them. In my opinion though the Egyptians cannot expect every single Egyptian antiquity to end up back in Egypt, even if questions arise how they were removed. Even though the Egyptian Antiquities Service has huge numbers of staff, concentrating on the wrongs of the past may well be taking energy and resources from dealing with problems of the present, and those matters which certainly need to find a resolution.

For example, instead of gathering documentation about the Nefertiti bust, it is suspicious that nothing much seems to be happening on the Ka Nefer Nefer front, Dr Hawass seems to find more possibilities in engaging in a paperchase with what may be seen as a partage gone wrong at the beginning of the century than displaying the paperwork proving a theft from a museum storeroom in the 1950s. Have they got such documentation or not?

Every so often the antiquities showman Hawass brings out into the light of publicity a royal mummy or some such item which had lain forgotten in a dusty corner of a museum somewhere or other. Perhaps the Egyptians should first concentrate on getting the archivisation of what they have already got in order before trying to accumulate more. In my opinion, Hawass should be chasing up items on the market now (like the Wenneb... shabti discussed here a few weeks ago) and finding out how they got there than worrying at the moment what went wrong in 1912. Protecting the archaeological resource which is threatened now rather than chasing objects safely archived in museums. Of course there is less easy publicity in that...

Perhaps like Athens, Hawass should go through the old spoilheaps and museum storerooms (or perhaps now search among the private collections) to find the missing eye from the famous bust, and then display it in an otherwise empty showcase to make the point.

Photo: the one-eyed Queen seems calm in the knowledge that she'll be staying in Berlin for a while yet (AFP).