German museum confirms travel ban for Queen Nefertiti

Dec 22, 2009, 12:54 GMT

Berlin - New tests show the limestone and plaster bust of Queen Nefertiti is too fragile to fly home to Egypt for a temporary exhibition, the Berlin museum that owns the disputed artwork said Tuesday.

It issued the statement two days after the Egyptian Museum's director, Friederike Seyfried, met in Cairo with Egypt's antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass. She said she did not negotiate over the 3,500-year-old bust with Hawass.

'An examination in 2007 of the state of preservation of the bust ruled it unsuitable for transport or loans,' said the Prussian Heritage Foundation, the parent corporation of the museum. 'Further tests which have not yet been completed only confirm this.'

The future of the exquisite head is highly political, as underlined by the fresh assessment of the bust in recent days.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's top culture aide, Bernd Neumann, said Tuesday through a spokesman that a loan was now 'absolutely out of the question on conservation grounds alone.'

Berlin insists Egypt has never officially laid claim to the bust, which was discovered during a 1912 excavation at Tell al-Amarna and allocated to the German arts patron who financed the dig when the treasure was parcelled out. He later gifted it to the Prussian state.

Neumann's spokesman insisted there were no negotiations taking place over the bust because its original acquisition was lawful. Monday reports quoted Hawass saying it had been removed from Egypt by deception.

The Prussian Heritage Foundation has denied the archaeologist, Ludwig Borchard, deliberately misled the Egyptian inspector of antiquities. The bust was later taken by ship and train to Berlin.

Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy, the Egyptian ambassador to Berlin, said it was ultimately up to technical experts to decide if the bust could travel. Ramzy said some art was the cultural heritage of all mankind, saying, 'It's very important to us, but important to the world too.'

The Nefertiti issue blew up again this month when French President Nicolas Sarkozy returned Pharaonic frescoes from the Louvre to Egypt. The paintings had been stolen from an excavation in 1975.

Egypt is believed to have asked to borrow Nefertiti to coincide with the opening of a large new museum in Egypt in five years' time.

The bust is on exhibit in the Egyptology section of the Neues Museum in the heart of Berlin on Museum Island.