The beautiful women of the ancient world have always had a dangerous streak. The face of Helen of Troy launched a thousand warships, and now the exquisite Queen Nefertiti is at the heart of an imminent museum war between Germany and Egypt.

The 3,400-year-old bust of the wife of the Sun King Akhenaten has been in German hands since it was dug out of the desert by the archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in 1912. It was smuggled out of Egypt and became a central part of Berlin’s museum collection.

Now the Egyptians want it back, if not for keeps, then at least on loan to mark the opening in 2012 of a new Grand Egyptian Museum, near the Pyramid at Giza. If the Egyptian Museum in Berlin does not agree, says Zahi Hawass, there will be trouble. “We will make the lives of these museums miserable,” the secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt said. “It will be a scientific war.”

German officials say that the bust is too fragile to travel. “Nefertiti is not a pop star that can simply go on tour,” a senior official said. Dietrich Wildung, head of the Egyptian Museum, says there is no doubt that Nefertiti is German property. “She was donated to the state museum in 1920 by James Simon [who sponsored the Borchardt dig].”

The bust, he says, has become globally famous in a way that it would not have had it stayed in Egypt. “Nefertiti has become an outstanding example of how the foreign can be integrated into society,” Dr Wildung says. “She is accepted, not assimilated. She keeps her separateness and her uniqueness, yet she belongs here.”

Nefertiti, in other words, is not budging. Mr Hawass has sent the Germans an ultimatum: “We will never again organise antiquities exhibitions in Germany if it refuses the request, to be issued this week, to allow the bust to be displayed in Egypt for three months.” The Germans, say the Egyptians, are afraid that they will never get Nefertiti back if they let her return home. “They think we will be like the Raiders of the Lost Ark, that we will take it and not return it,” said Mr Hawass, who has been a vociferous champion for the permanent return of Egyptian artefacts.

The special beauty of the Nefertiti bust — the face painted on limestone, poised on top of a swanlike neck — was apparent to Borchardt as soon as he found it in the old settlement of Amarna, 150 kilometres (90 miles) south of Cairo.

“Suddenly we had the most alive Egyptian artwork in our hands,” he wrote in his diary.

“You cannot describe it with words. You can only see it.”

To take it out of the country, Borchardt had to hide the bust on an inventory and declare it as a minor find.

Ironically, the only official who ever considered giving it back was Hermann Goering, the Nazi air force chief, who later plundered Europe’s art collections. Hitler overruled him: Nefertiti was to be the jewel in the crown, he said, of a redesigned Berlin that was to be called Germania, the capital of the Thousand-Year Reich.

“I really want it back,” Mr Hawass says of Nefertiti, and most Egyptians seem to agree. They were as upset as him in 2003, when the Egyptian Museum let two artists place the bust on top of a nearly naked female bronze for a video spectacle.

Egyptian cultural officials were so outraged by what they said was the abuse of Nefertiti that they banned further German exploration in their country. “I thought it was disgusting,” Mr Hawass said.

On that occasion the Germans backed down, and the video of Nefertiti was not sent, as planned, to the Venice Biennale modern art festival. This time, it seems, the Germans are not prepared to give ground.

Royal beauty

—Nefertiti means “a beautiful woman has arrived” — leading some scholars to believe she came from a foreign land, possibly Mesopotamia
—Most agree she co-ruled Egypt from 1353-1336BC
—An inscription on her husband’s statue proclaimed: “And the Heiress, Great in the Palace, Fair of Face, Adorned with the Double Plumes, Mistress of Happiness, Endowed with Favours, at hearing whose voice the King rejoices, the Chief Wife of the King, his beloved, the Lady of the Two Lands, Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti” Sources: Akhet.co.uk; Discovery.com

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