By Jean-Baptiste Piggin

 

Sometimes rated the most beautiful depiction of a woman in history, the bust of Queen Nefertiti has gone back into the company in a Berlin museum of its counterpart, a sculptor’s master model of King Akhenaten of Egypt.

The 3,350-year-old artefacts are the highlights of a special exhibition at the Egyptology department of the Neues Museum which runs until April 2013.

The king is not a pretty sight. The face is horribly disfigured, with the eyes, nose and ears sheared away. The bust has been pieced together from several broken chunks found 100 years ago in the bone-dry sand of Amarna, about 300km south of Cairo.

For the current show, museum sculptors re-created the chin and lips from smooth stucco, but that partial repair below the shattered face only makes the bust as a whole appear spookier. He seems like a beast, too horrible to behold.

Only the shoulders and chest have survived well, with a painted garment intact and a shred of gold leaf hinting at the former magnificence of the sculpture. Legend has it that opponents bashed in the face in rage at Akhenaten’s imposed-from-above new state religion.

But Friederike Seyfried, director of the Egyptian department, said during a media tour that the sculpture may simply have fared worse because it was nearer the surface of the ground and more exposed to the elements during the long wait to be rediscovered.

An intact but nearly white bust of Akhenaten borrowed from the Louvre Museum in Paris as well as a resin copy made in Berlin by 3-D printing have been placed nearby in Berlin for comparison.

“The Louvre one has less paint left on it than ours,” explained Seyfried. The sculptor seems to have made many busts of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, all of them in limestone, with plaster added for the fine details, topped by paint to make them lifelike.

Berlin’s Nefertiti and damaged Akhenaten are being shown in separate rooms. Nefertiti is one

of the city’s most celebrated art treasures, seen by 1mn tourists annually, whereas Akhenaten has only been intermittently on display.

He became king in about 1350 BC.

The sculptures are almost certainly idealisations of Akhenaten, who ruled for 17 years, and Nefertiti, his chief wife, and no truer to life than the rash of modern legends that have sprung up around Egypt’s most glamorous royal couple.

At the Berlin show’s opening, a Belgian archaeologist put paid to a myth that Nefertiti was banished to the nether regions of the palace for the last six years of the reign or even executed for plotting or other hanky-panky.

Harco Willems, director of Louvain University’s excavations at Dayr al-Barsha, announced the discovery of an inscription in an old underground quarry near Amarna that mentions Nefertiti in the 16th year of the reign.

“The story that they divorced has just gone up in smoke,” said Michael Eissenhauer, head of the Berlin museums.

Willems is exploring a 10km-long pharaonic mining strip north of Amarna where stone for the Amarna temples and palaces was quarried. He has catalogued markings in them, sometimes just red lines on ceilings, often dates and occasionally royal names. “You can only make sense of it all when you have recorded the entirety of the quarries,” he explained.

The current Berlin show is the first for 100 years to show almost the entire hoard which was recovered from a onetime junk heap in the Amarna palace complex by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt a century ago.

Seyfried said that the artefacts were deliberately left behind by Akhenaten’s courtiers, since Amarna was abandoned after his rule.

Anything of value was taken away, so the debris only contains objects that were irreparable or regarded as worthless.

Among them is a broken ivory horse-blinker marked with the name Thutmose. He is thought to have been the chief of three sculptors living on the site and therefore the master who created the busts. The exhibition, entitled In the Light of Amarna — 100 Years since Nefertiti’s Excavation, celebrates Borchardt’s work in a relatively confined area: the ruins of the sculptors’ homes and workshops.

Everything Borchardt found there has been put on display in the current exhibition, including pots with blue-lotus decorations and simple coloured glass beads. The art of glassmaking reached Egypt from Asia Minor in about 1500 BC.

The December 6, 1912 entry in the excavation notebook, digitised and searchable as part of the show, says, “Found: Life-sized bust of the queen. Colours as if painted yesterday. Outstanding work. Pointless to describe it: see it.”

Some of the artefacts have not been seen in public since before the World War I.

Berlin’s is not in fact the world’s biggest Amarna collection. That is found in the Petrie Museum in London, Seyfried said.

The show also looks at the ownership dispute that has raged for decades over the Nefertiti bust, including copies of the first prickly letters exchanged between the Germans and the Egyptian and French authorities in 1924-25.

A millionaire Berlin patron of the arts, James Simon, financed the 1912 excavation.

The usual practice back then was to divide the treasure with the Egyptian government. The finds were inventoried and Simon was allotted half, or 5,500 pieces, which were shipped back to Berlin. He later donated the collection to his country.

Nowadays, Egypt and most other countries ban exports of cultural treasures and archaeologists only take away images and samples. Critics, the latest of them being Zahi Hawass, who was Egypt’s antiquities chief under former president Hosni Mubarak, have alleged there was a plot to hoodwink Egypt and spirit Nefertiti away without the slender-necked bust’s true worth being recognised.

The Berlin exhibition argues the division was transparent and frank. It includes the inventory, drafted in French by Egypt’s antiquities inspector Gustav Lefebvre, and elegant 1912 black-and-white photos made in Egypt of Nefertiti before departure.

Seyfried is hoping the centennial show will not trigger another flare-up in the ownership dispute and that her museum’s amicable co-operation with Egyptian researchers will continue.

She said she had offered funding and support during her recent visits with the archaeology community in Egypt, but the turmoil there made it difficult for Cairo antiquities officials under the new President, Mohamed Mursi, to commit to new research projects yet.

The Berlin show gives an insight into the short-lived religion which Akhenaten founded, which prescribed belief in one god only, the sun. Models show his principal temple, which had no roof, since all the votive altars in it had to be exposed to the sun.

The mesmerising Nefertiti bust remains by itself in an adjoining room. Seyfried said the sculpture is now too fragile to move, amid signs that her stucco finishing layer is separating in many places from the limestone beneath and could be shaken off by sharp motion.

The bust, though missing one eye, has come to be recognised as one of the most accomplished sculptures of a woman of all time. A bronze replica of Nefertiti has been placed next to her glass case so blind visitors can take away a tactile memory of her beauty, touching her long slender neck, high cheekbones and everted lips.

Seyfried said the century-long interval since Simon’s first show of the artefacts in 1913 and now was largely the consequence of moving the hoard to safe storage during the World War II, followed by a four-decade division of the collection between two countries, former East and West Germany.

“It doesn’t come from laxness on our part. It comes from what happened in Germany,” she said. — DPA

 

 

* Below: A contemporary limestone relief depicting King Akhenaten (left), Queen Nefertiti and three daughters under the sun, the pharaoh’s new god (New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, 1351-1334 BC.)