Who owns beauty ? World art and culture in our museums (2)

Queen Nefertiti was the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who decided in the 14th^century B.C. to break with the religion of his predecessors, to create a new cult, the cult of the sun, and to break with traditional Egyptian art, to create a new art, the so-called art of Amarna. The bust of Queen Nefertiti, now in Berlin's Neues Museum, was discovered in 1912 by Berlin archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt, who found a sculptor's workshop full of works of art in the Egyptian sands. He obtained permission from the French, who controlled Egyptian antiquities, to export the entire collection to Berlin. It was shown in Berlin in 1913: Amarna's art fascinated the Berlin avant-garde, who saw in these faces their own mirror. A veritable aesthetic fertilization took place in interwar Berlin. Immediately after the First World War, the French regretted having let such an important aesthetic work go, and then in the 1920s, as Egypt became an autonomous country, it began to demand the bust's return. Adolf Hitler, who, according to French newspapers, had declared that he had fallen in love with Nefertiti, refused to return it to Egypt in 1934. So who owns Nefertiti? It's a Franco-German affair, and not just Egyptian-German, since the division of the excavations in 1912 also comes into play. Does Nefertiti belong to Berlin's local heritage? Or does she belong to the Egyptian children who helped excavate her? Or does it belong to the Egyptian people of today, who have a right to this object of art in their beautiful museum in Cairo? Or does it belong, as we sometimes hear, to all mankind?