Rare new head of Queen Nefertiti discovered

Editor`s note: The new head bust of Nefertiti discovered (below left) has the slender facial features of my cousin sister Nusrat Akhter - most notably the high arched cheek bones, slender yet graceful facial lines and contour with a prominent chin. The lips also are also uncanny in capturing the sense of pouting and with an outward philtrum along the upper lip. Not bad for being synonymous with the 'most beautiful woman in the world.' This is to my readers who are associated with my family in knowing my cousin sister - RA [Rubaiat`s Blog]

by Judith Weingarten
June 2, 2012
Just breaking news: a new head of Nefertiti has been identified (left).

This, we now must acknowledge, is a head of the famous Queen Nefertiti, wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten (1353-1336 BCE). After some serious detective work, Dr Christian E. Loeben, Egyptologist at the August Kestner Museum in Hanover, Germany, has established its true and fascinating identity. It had been thought, wrongly as it now turns out, that this fragment of a face depicted the unisex pharaoh himself.

Dr Loeben has been able to demonstrate convincingly that it is in fact the illustrious queen, whose most famous portrait is the polychrome bust kept in the Berlin Museum (below left).

It measures barely 5.5 cm (2.2") in height, but the red-brown quartzite* head is a tiny masterpiece of Egyptian art.

"Until now, no Egyptologist had noticed that at the time of Pharaoh Akhenaten, only women's portraits were done in quartzite. Nefertiti is the only possible option for this remarkably fine miniature portrait," says Loeben.

"This is a truly sensational discovery," chimes in Dr Christian Bayer, Egyptologist at the University of Munster and specialist in Nefertiti: "It is very exciting to be able to add this extraordinary piece to the relatively limited collection of statues of Nefertiti."

The fact that this discovery has taken place this year is all the more remarkable given that it is exactly one hundred years since the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt found the world-famous bust of Nefertiti (left) in 1912, during his excavations at Tell el-Amarna, the new capital city founded by Akhenaten:

Suddenly we had the most alive Egyptian artwork in our hands, Ludwig Borchardt wrote in his diary for 1912. You cannot describe it with words. You can only see it.

That "most beautiful woman in the world" now reigns over the Neues Museum in Berlin, enthroned alone in a domed room that overlooks the length of the Museum.

The small quartzite head, on the contrary, is secluded in a private collection in Europe and is therefore not normally accessible to the public.

Illustrations:

• Upper left: photograph from the EEF BBS website (submitted by Raymond Betz). Photo credit: Alain Speltdoorn.

• Below left: Welt Online.

(click here to read the full article and updates to the discovery on Zenobia)