Hamburg - Using 21st Century medical computer technology, German researchers have unveiled the "hidden face" below the surface facial features of the famed bust of 18th Dynasty Queen Nefertiti - dispelling once and for all nagging rumours that the bust might be a duplicate made at the orders of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, and that the genuine bust was lost in the chaos following World War II.
The researchers from Berlin's Imaging Science Institute at Charite Hospital made a series of CT scans of the bust and confirmed findings of a less sophisticated CT scan 17 years ago which revealed that the sculpture has a limestone core and is covered in layers of plaster-like stucco, called "render" by Egyptologists.
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That finding was not new. But what was new is the fact that the new CT scan revealed that the limestone core was carved with such artistic precision that it forms a veritable inner copy of the outer face.
Now the Berlin experts are wondering whether the original artist originally carved the bust in limestone, but then changed his mind and added a plaster glaze which gave the queen softer and more rounded features. The experts say the limestone facial features are a bit more angular.
Shame-faced Egyptian authorities realised they had made a ghastly mistake It is a question which may never be answered. But the latest CT scan does answer the lingering question as to whether the bust, which forms the cornerstone of Berlin's Egyptian collection, is genuinely 3 300 years old - or whether it is a fake made 70 years ago as part of a scheme by the Nazi fuehrer to assuage Egyptian ire by giving them a fake bust of Nefertiti, while Hitler kept the original for his own private collection.
No 20th Century artist would go to the extraordinary trouble of carving a limestone bust in exquisite detail and then hiding it below a coat of plaster.
'I will never relinquish the head of the Queen'
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