7 proofs of fake Nefertiti bust

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Today, the bust of Nefertiti is one of the most famous works of ancient Egyptian art, executed in the Amarna style. The bust is a stylized portrait of Queen Nefertiti, who was the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who went down in history thanks to a number of innovative reforms, his reign fell on the period from 1351-1334. BC. The bust of Nefertiti is currently on display at the New Museum in Berlin.

Experts argue about the origin of the queen, about what kind of family she was, however, for ordinary people, disputes about the authenticity of the famous artifact are more interesting. They have been going on for a long time, and the last heavy blow to the defenders of the version of its authenticity was dealt by the Swiss art critic Henri Stierlin, who categorically declared a forgery. What are his arguments?

In 1912, German archaeologists, led by Ludwig Borchardt, carried out excavations of one of the destroyed settlements, of which there are a lot in the territory of modern Egypt. According to experts, they were excavating a workshop that belonged to the tsarist sculptor.

One day, a part of the sculpture was noticed by archaeologists among the brick dust. After many hours of attempts to carefully pull her out of the sand and rubble of the brick walls of the house, historians were able to see that their find was a life-size bust of a woman, made of limestone and with beautifully preserved paints. The woman's face had a gentle oval, a perfectly outlined puffy mouth, magnificent tonsil-shaped eyes, and a straight nose. The left eye is slightly scratched and, apparently, due to this defect, the eye fell out, which is well preserved on the right side. The right eye is a rock crystal insert with a small ebony pupil. The blue wig, rather tall, is wrapped in a small ash headband, which is adorned with precious stones. According to the assumptions of archaeologists, earlier on the forehead of the bust there was an urey - a symbol of royal power in the form of a sacred snake.

The bust was taken by German archaeologists to Germany and today it is kept in the New Museum in Egypt. Throughout the twentieth century, the find has repeatedly been subjected to a variety of experiments by scientists. And just recently, researchers made a sensational conclusion, according to which the face of the most beautiful queen of Ancient Egypt was retouched after the initial version of the bust was made. So using the methods of computed tomography, the researchers were able to see under the layer of plaster, the real face of this woman - the pharaoh. As it turned out, Akhenaten's wife had a small hump on her nose, the corners of her lips were slightly lowered down, there were dimple folds on her cheeks, and her cheekbones were not so clearly marked. Although the eyes were more expressive. Historians believe that the bust has been reworked more than once in accordance with the changing canons of female beauty. So more than once the cheekbones were polished, the face changed, the eyes deepened, only the royal ears remained intact.

Together with the bust of Nefertiti, the Berlin Museum displays frescoes of Akhenaten's second wife, a small statuette of the Great Queen, also made of limestone, and two portraits of Nefertiti - of plaster and granite. But despite the excellent condition of the rest of the exhibits in this ancient Egyptian exhibition, the bust invariably attracts the attention of tourists. It is he who is the main attraction of the museum and the hallmark of all the art of Amarna.

Due to granite erosion, the outlines of the face have become blurred. The degree of erosion shows that this sculpture is more than one thousand years old. It is almost impossible to fake erosive destruction.

It is difficult to date the colored bust of Nefertiti using natural scientific methods traditional for archaeologists, since it is made of stone. However, critical analysis is still possible. Its main points are outlined in the 2009 book by Henri Stirlin, The Bust of Nefertiti - An Egyptological Swindle?

What weighty arguments does the author make?

1. Suspicious ideal preservation of the find

It is believed that the conditions for the stay of the bust of Nefertiti in the ground were simply ideal, which raises relevant questions. Of course, there are even well-preserved mummies, for example, found there, in Amarna. But they were in walled up burials in stone tombs, without access to air, with constant levels of humidity and temperature. And the so-called workshop of Thutmose, where the bust of the queen was discovered, was in the open air. Obviously, the conditions for the stay of the sculptural items in it were completely different, much more destructive.

Moreover, the city of Amarna, or Akhetaton, stood on the gentle bank of the Nile, and Thutmose's workshop was located about 150-200 meters from the water. During periodic floods (up to 7 meters high), the entire territory was flooded with water. All the items that were allegedly found in this workshop, including a colored bust, at this time should have been, if not in water, then in very wet soil. At the time of its discovery, the bust of Nefertiti lay deep in the sand on the very bank of the river. How can you believe that he lay in such conditions for 3360 years and still remained practically unharmed?

For comparison. On the left is a genuine sculpture of Nefertiti's head. We clearly see what the natural destruction of limestone is in reality. The artifact was found in Amarna, height - 36 cm.

The famous bust of Nefertiti has no traces of contact with the ground at all. Gypsum is a rather soft material, so it is surprising that there is not a single scratch in the portrait of the queen, only the ear is peeled off, the base of the sculpture is slightly damaged …

2. Sustainability

Ancient Egyptian sculpture is always made with an excessive margin of stability, this is almost its main feature. Any master of Ancient Egypt felt the distribution of gravity in his creation, and never did something airy, light and unstable. Everything was going on for many centuries, the statues should not have toppled over from an accidental light impact. The bust of Nefertiti is in conflict with these traditions, its center of gravity is strongly shifted forward, making the sculpture extremely unstable. To solve this problem, when installed in a Berlin museum, two metal pins were installed in its base. I wonder how Akhenaten would mount a bust of his beloved wife in his palace?

Left: X-ray of the bust. Right: when zoomed in, you can clearly see the superposition of two layers of gypsum of different densities. Obviously, this was necessary to bring the sculpture to at least some kind of balance. It can be seen that at first a less dense cast was applied, but the figure remained unstable. Then a new, denser layer of gypsum was added. The bust has become more stable, but clearly not enough: with a slight push, the figure would lose balance.

3. Shoulders

One of the striking features of the figure is the vertically cut shoulders. Not a single ancient Egyptian sculpture has such a shape, they always ended either with a neck, or were made to the waist or to full height. On the face of the inconsistency with the canons.

4. Expedition log

Further. All professional archaeologists keep a journal where they record information about the found values: where, when and how they were discovered. The appearance is described, photographs or their sketches are attached, and so on. The journals of Borchardt's expedition have survived, but there is no mention of a beautiful and surprising find in them. As there is no special permission in the archives, which is issued by the Egyptian side when exporting archaeological finds outside the country.

The lack of primary information about the sculpture naturally alarms researchers, but then this story becomes even stranger. After the sculpture was seen by the Duke of Saxon, who came to the excavation exactly on the day of its discovery, it disappears from the field of view of scientists and the public for 11 years. It turns out that all this time the sculpture was simply kept by James Simon, who sponsored the expedition. Is this possible when it comes to a sensational archaeological find?

5. The second sculpture under the first

At the time of Borchardt, there was no computed tomography, but now it is and clarifies a lot. With her help, a strange thing was revealed - there is a second sculpture inside the bust. It turns out that the artist first worked with a stone, making a blank, and then molded plaster on it, giving more perfect forms. This is simple and understandable, but none of the ancient masters used such a technology for making sculptures. Such cases are not known to the archeology of Ancient Egypt. This is the most important argument in favor of only a hundred years of age for the bust, since we are talking about modern fake technology.

6. Planned one-eyed

With the help of a tomograph, the specialists managed to look under the rock crystal from which the sculpture's right eye was made. It turned out that the left eye has a flat surface, the right one has a convex surface. It became obvious that the left crystal eye was not lost, as it was believed before, it simply never existed. One-eyed was originally planned. But could not Thutmose have made the queen one-eyed?

7. Ears were also damaged during production

The tomography also gave grounds to assert that the ear damage was also carried out at the workpiece level.

The right ear of the queen's head, here you can see the work of the forger. He defiantly left traces of the reconstruction of the damaged ear, which he needed only so that the damage he himself inflicted looked natural. By mistake of the master, there are no traces of millennial erosion on the ear. It can be seen that the paint on it was scraped off as if yesterday, a piece of plaster was chipped off and immediately glued, that is, parts of the sculpture did not lie apart from each other in the sand for more than three thousand years.

Henri Stirlin suggests that the bust of Nefertiti was created by the sculptor Gerhard Marx at the request of Borchardt in order to try out ancient paints brought from the excavations. However, when the beauty of the "masterpiece" was appreciated by Prince Johann Georg, Borchardt did not dare to admit, so as not to put the distinguished guest in a stupid position, and pretended that it was really an ancient sculpture.

There is also a more radical version of falsification. Allegedly, the entire expedition of Ludwig Borchardt initially aimed to legalize forgeries made on the basis of Nefertiti's granite head, which was the only genuine artifact discovered by the expedition.

Berlin writer Erdogan Erchivan in his book "The Lost Links of Archeology" is not trifling with trifles: at once one hundred famous archaeological treasures (among them, say, the treasures of Troy, now stored in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow), he "exposes" as fakes … The chapter on Nefertiti is one of the most modest in this book. According to Erchivan, behind the forgery was not Borchard's evil will, but a desire to try his hand: how much is he able to reproduce ancient samples? Erchivan also believes that not only the ancient images that he discovered in the studio of the sculptor Thutmose served as a model for Borchard (the authenticity of numerous images of Nefertiti from granite, marble, jade and other stones is beyond doubt), but also the German archaeologist's own wife. The author of the book claims that the bust "bears an imprint of similarities" with Madame Borchard.

The argumentation of another whistleblower - the French writer and photographer Andre Stirlin - largely coincides with that of Erchivan, but contains much more scientific and historical details. So, he suggests that Borchard reconstructed the appearance of Nefertiti in order to demonstrate how ancient jewelry looked like: it is known that he wore his jewelry finds on the bust. During the reconstruction, he used the paints that he found on the walls of Egyptian tombs.

Borchard also worked closely with Egyptian counterfeiters: this craft flourished for the needs of tourists already in the 19th century. The archaeologist's goal was, however, noble: to learn to distinguish fakes from originals. Nevertheless, it was from his hands that the "ancient" stele came to the Egyptian Museum, which was identified by experts as a fake only a few years ago.

In the case of Nefertiti Borchard, as Stirlin suggests, initially did not want to pass off his forgery as the original. But the colorful bust delighted everyone so that the story acquired its own dynamics …

Experts at the Berlin Egyptian Museum, headed by its director, Professor Dietrich Wildung, reject all suggestions that it could be a forgery. They refer to both repeated studies of the ancient statue and historical documents.

It all started back in 1906, when the German Oriental Society acquired the rights to conduct excavations in the vicinity of el-Amarna, the supposed ancient capital of Pharaoh Akhenaten - Akhetaton. The excavations were financed by the Berlin philanthropist James Simon, a wealthy cotton merchant, at the same time a passionate patriot of Prussia and an equally passionate lover of antiquities. In the fall of 1912, excavations began in the P 47 quarter, designated in the plan of archaeologists as the ruins of a residential building. Under a layer of sand, they discovered the workshop of the court sculptor Thutmose. The beautiful Nefertiti reigned supreme in the artist's studio: her images were found in every imaginable form: from a miniature wooden figure to the famous bust. “The bust of the queen is 47 centimeters high. In a high cut from the top wig, tied in the middle with a wide ribbon. Paints - as if they had just been applied. Excellent work. It is useless to describe. You must see …”- such an entry was made in his diary on December 6, 1912 by Ludwig Borchard, archaeologist and science attaché at the Prussian consulate in Cairo. In 1913, the precious find was brought to Germany, where it was then kept in various museums.

For some time now, the queen has been patronizing Museum Island, very effectively “lobbying” its interests. For example, funding for the restoration of the New Museum in Berlin was once approved under the slogan of creating a "home for Nefertiti." In general, the Egyptian queen is a good reason for sensations. As Professor Wildung said: "A beautiful woman and a scandal: it always sells well."

To this day, a dispute continues between the Egyptian government and the management of the museum in Berlin over the final resolution of property issues in relation to this historical monument. In Egypt, on the Giza plateau, an exhibition is planned in the very near future, which will present various ancient Egyptian sculptures and portraits from around the world, and the bust of Nefertiti is expected to become the main event and attraction.

The Germans, in turn, refuse to return the bust of the queen to Egypt, to her historical homeland, explaining that there are serious concerns about the possibility of damage to the relic during transportation. Thus, studies of limestone, of which the bust of Nefertiti is known to consist, shows the presence of cavities in the image, which can contribute to destruction under unfavorable conditions on the way.