Free Republic

Jan Nikolai Nelles and Nora Al-Badri, two artists, made headlines last month for announcing that they had sneaked into the Neues Museum in Berlin. They did not make the headlines for just sneaking into the museum. They had with them a hacked Kinect Sensor with which they performed an unauthorized 3D scan of the bust of Queen Nefertiti. If you have never heard about the iconic bust of Queen Nefertiti, you probably should read this. It is the most iconic artifact of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. It is 3,300 years old and is made of limestone and painted and...

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - They were together only a few hours. But that brief union of a celebrated, 3,000-year-old bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti with a modern bronze nude body touched off a furor. Some Egyptians are calling the art project at Berlin's Egyptian Museum an insult to their culture and demanding the return of the ancient bust, charging it isn't safe in German hands. The museum director, Dietrich Wildung, answers that his museum's most famous piece was never at risk and defends the videotaping of Nefertiti's head on a nude torso as a legitimate artistic experiment. The tape...

Two archaeological discoveries led to the identification of the creator of Nefertiti's bust. The first was uncovered at Tell el-Amarna near the artists' workshop where the bust was created. (The bust was unearthed in this workshop during excavations in December 1912.) Outside the workshop, the excavators discovered a horse's blinker -- used to prevent the horse from looking toward the rear and sometimes to the side -- inscribed with the name Thutmose, who was identified by the following titles: "favored by the King," "Chief of Works," and "seankh" (a designation that means "he who gives the final touch of life"2...

Berlin's Egyptian Museum has said that it will celebrate the centenary of the discovery of the 3,400-year-old fabled bust of Egypt's Queen Nefertiti amid an ongoing feud with Cairo over its ownership. The museum said it would open an exhibition on Dec. 6 honoring the famous sculpture and other jewels of the Amarna period in its collection on the German capital's Museum Island. On the same day in 1912, the bust was unearthed by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt. "The exhibition focuses on never-before-seen discoveries from the collections of the Berlin museum, supplemented by loans from other museums abroad," it said,...

Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, announced that his country wanted its queen handed back forthwith, unless Germany could prove that the 3,500-year-old bust of Akhenaten's wife wasn't spirited illegally out of Egypt nearly a century ago... Then he said he was sure the work had been stolen... Mr. Hawass also recently fired a shot at France, demanding the Louvre return five fresco fragments it purchased in 2000 and 2003 from a gallery and at auction. They belonged to a 3,200-year-old tomb near Luxor and had been in storage at the museum. Egypt had made the demand before, but this time...

Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin, author of a dozen works on Egypt, the Middle East and ancient Islam, says in a just-released book that the bust currently in Berlin's Altes Museum was made on the orders of Germany archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt on site at the digs by an artist named Gerardt Marks... He said he believed it was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians. The historian said the archaeologist had hoped to produce a new portrait of the queen wearing a necklace he knew she had owned and also carry out a colour test with ancient pigments...

"This time I mean it very seriously," is how Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, characterized his fresh demand for the bust of Queen Nefertiti, which German archaeologists brought home in 1913... Hawass has long called on Berlin to return the bust of Nefertiti, which sits in the city's Egyptian Museum, but SPIEGEL revealed in this week's edition of the magazine that an obscure document from 1924 charged the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt with "cheating" to secure the bust for Germany... The secretary of the German Oriental Institute reported in 1924 on a 1913 meeting between Borchardt and a senior...

An ancient Egyptian queen regarded as the Mona Lisa of the ancient world may not have been such a looker after all, German scientists said on Tuesday. A delicately carved face in the limestone core of the famous bust of Nefertiti suggests the royal sculptor at the time may have smoothed creases around the mouth and fixed a bumpy nose to depict the "Beauty of the Nile" in a better light. The bust of Nefertiti was found in Egypt in 1912 at Tell el-Amarna, the short-lived capital of Nefertiti's husband, the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It is now housed in Berlin's Altes...

Queen Nefertiti: More than a pretty face German scientists have discovered that the world's most beautiful woman allowed herself to be sculpted with wrinkles to appear more beautiful. Maybe wrinkles are not so bad, after all, some German scientists have discovered. In ancient times, such laugh lines and wrinkles around the mouth improved the face of Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen acclaimed as the world's most beautiful woman. X-ray pictures of the bust by a computer tomography machine at the nearby Charite Hospital in Berlin revealed that the sculpture is a piece of limestone with details added using four outer layers...

The man responsible for protecting Egypt's antiquities has said he will "fight" for the return of an ancient bust of Nefertiti, an ancient Egyptian queen, now housed in a Berlin museum. Zahi Hawass also requested the temporary return of other ancient Egyptian artifacts, including the Rosetta Stone which is housed in London's British museum. "Some people say, 'If we give this bust to Egypt for three months they will not return it'." Hawass said, regarding the bust of Nefertiti, in an interview on Wednesday.Zahi Hawass is seeking "unique artifacts" from at least 10 museums around the world [AP]Germany says the...

Discovered in 1912 at Tel-El-Amarna in what used to be the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, the bust - depicting a woman with a long neck, elegantly arched brows, high cheekbones, a slender nose and an enigmatic smile played about red lips, has become the international symbol of beauty. However, a new examination of the famous bust has revealed visible wrinkles running down her slender neck, and puffy bags circling, leading experts to now believe that Nefertiti was an aging beauty. Dietrich Wildung, director of Berlin's Egyptian museum, who is part of the investigation, revealed that signs of aging had...