Ahram Online
Nevine El-Aref , Saturday 7 Sep 2024
Renowned Egyptologist and former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass has revived an initiative to repatriate the 3400-year-old Bust of Queen Nefertiti, launching an international petition calling for the return of the iconic bust to its homeland after decades of being on display in Berlin, Germany.
The Bust of Queen Nefertiti.
The link to the petition, launched during Hawass’ seminar at Nefertiti Cultural Salon in Prince Taz Palace in Historic Cairo, will be published on Sunday on Hawass’ website and Instagram account for all the international community to sign in a step toward taking more steps to repatriate the queen.
“I am writing on behalf of Egyptians – and everyone who is strongly advocating for Egypt’s heritage to be restored to its home – to submit a request for the repatriation of the painted limestone bust of Nefertiti, accessioned in the Neues Museum as Inventory No. AM 21300,” said Hawass.
He added: “This bust, remarkable and unrivalled in history for its historical and aesthetic merit, is now in Germany, but it is time for it to come home to Egypt.”
Hawass pointed out that it was planned to ask for the Bust of Nefertiti and the Rosetta Stone in 2011 but the circumstances at that time impeded their immediate return.
He noted that the two pieces left Egypt illegally and they need to be returned.
The new state-of-the-art Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) is waiting for them to return home, Hawass said.
“Returning these two iconic artefacts to Egypt would be an important acknowledgment of the commitment of Western museums to decolonize their collections and make reparations for the past,” Hawass pointed out.
“With countless countries demanding their cultural heritage to be repatriated, Egypt is no exception and no less deserving,” he said, calling on the international community to demand the repatriation of the Queen Nefertiti’s bust through signing and sharing this petition.
For more than 100 years, he explains in the petition, Egypt has been deprived of many of its most significant ancient Egyptian artifacts – one of which is the 18th Dynasty Bust of Queen Nefertiti, which has never failed to gather innumerable visitors to Berlin’s famed Neues Museum.
“Despite many ignored calls for meaningful dialogue as well as requests for acknowledgment of how this unique artifact ended up in Germany, this petition today is meant to re-ignite that conversation, inspire the return of the bust to Cairo, and elicit a dignified response from German authorities.”
“For the last twenty years, Egypt’s repatriation efforts have been commendable,” Hawass asserted, adding that from as far as the USA to as close as Europe, Egyptian authorities, with the help of international policing and diplomatic bodies, have retrieved and repatriated thousands of artefacts taken out of the country illegally.
“This request, therefore, is a logical outcome of our nation's longstanding policy of demanding the return of any historical and archaeological artefacts that have been unlawfully removed from the nation, particularly those that are thought to be unique,” Hawass wrote in the petition.
He noted that contemporaneous and subsequent records documenting the excavation and distribution of finds of the collection of artefacts comprising the Bust of Nefertiti verify that the bust was removed from Egypt against the letter and the spirit of the Egyptian laws in effect at the time.
Since the first full publication of the Bust of Nefertiti, which did not appear until over a decade after its discovery in 1912 by Ludwig Borchardt, Egypt has made a number of attempts to repatriate this priceless sculpture.
In the petition, Hawass writes that in terms of legal frameworks, article 13(b) of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (1970) calls on all states party to the convention – ratified by Germany in 2007 and accepted by Egypt in 1973 – to “ensure that their competent services cooperate in facilitating the earliest possible restitution of illicitly exported cultural property to its rightful owner.”
This convention was further amplified by the “Plea for the return of an irreplaceable cultural heritage to those who created it” by Mr. Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, former Director-General of UNESCO, in 1978.
It calls upon “those responsible for preserving and restoring works of art to facilitate, by their advice and actions, the return of such works to the countries where they were created.”
Rightfully, the petition also underscores a “return of at least the art treasures which best represent their culture.”
Decades-old effort
The new petition campaign is not the first time that Hawass has asked for the return of these artefacts to their homeland.
In 2005, as secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), he noted at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin, held at the UN cultural agency UNESCO in Paris, that Egypt has been deprived of five key items of the country’s cultural heritage and that these should be handed over to their homeland.
The bust is ranked first on these key elements exhibited abroad that Egypt hopes to see returned.
The other four artefacts are the Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum in London; the statue of Hemiunnu, architect of the Great Pyramid, in the Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum in Hilesheim; the Dendara Temple Zodiac in the Louvre in Paris; and the Bust of Kephren's pyramid builder Ankhaf in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
In 2011, Hawass sent an official request to Germany asking for the return of the magnificent 3400-year-old Bust of Queen Nefertiti, now on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin.
In 2022 he launched a portion for the return of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum.
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