The triumphant soft opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) on the Pyramids Plateau in October gave Egyptian and international audiences a taste of what they can expect to see when the museum as a whole opens to the public next year.

In the meantime, the soft opening of the Museum, the world’s largest devoted to a single civilisation, has allowed visitors to admire both the museum’s unequalled collection and the marvellous job the architects and exhibition designers have done in designing a suitable setting for it.

While the GEM is set to take its place as the world’s most important Museum devoted to the ancient Egyptian civilisation, other institutions, often, but not always, in Europe, also have important collections of ancient Egyptian antiquities. Some of these, among them in London, Paris, and New York in the US, were visited by Al-Ahram Weekly in the run-up to the soft opening of the GEM.

This week, the Weekly is visiting the Neues Museum in the German capital Berlin, which houses one of the world’s best-known collections of ancient Egyptian artefacts, not least because of its star attraction, the famous bust of the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti, wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, dating back to around 1345 BCE.

This was discovered by the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt during excavations in Egypt at the beginning of the last century. As well as being of one of ancient Egypt’s most-famous queens, the bust is almost unique in ancient Egyptian art. Realising its extraordinary importance, Borchardt spirited it out of Egypt in 1912.

After many vicissitudes, it ended up in a room of its own on the first floor of the Neues Museum, where visitors today can marvel at the astonishing workmanship and psychological realism of this bust made by anonymous craftsmen in ancient Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.

Like some other ancient Egyptian artefacts in collections abroad, the Nefertiti bust has been reclaimed by Egypt, which wants to see the bust and other items of comparable importance, among them the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum in London and the Zodiac Ceiling in the Louvre in Paris, returned to the country so that they can be put on show in the GEM.

Former minister of antiquities ZahiHawass has launched a petition for the bust to be returned to Egypt, pointing out that it left the country in murky circumstances in 1912, when Borchardt apparently deliberately sought to conceal its importance. “This bust, remarkable and unrivalled in history for its historical and aesthetic merit, is now in Germany, but it is time for it to come home to Egypt,”Hawass was quoted as saying in the Weekly in November this year.

“Returning this iconic artefact to Egypt would be an important acknowledgment of the commitment of Western museums to decolonise their collections and make reparations for the past.”

While the debate over the Nefertiti bust and other items rumbles on, the bust continues to attract visitors to the Neues Museum, one of a cluster on Berlin’s famous “Museum Island” that marks the beginning of the Unter den Linden avenue in the east of the city and leads to the Brandenburg Gate and German parliament the Reichstag in the west.

Like the other museums on the Island and the surrounding buildings, the Neues Museum was severely damaged by bombing at the end of World War II, and for a time its future was in doubt.

Many of the other damaged buildings were demolished by the then East German Government that controlled this area of Berlin, and while the neighbouring Altes Museum, which houses ancient Greek and Roman collections, the Pergamon Museum, which houses important materials from ancient Mesopotamia including the Babylonian Ishtar Gate, and the AlteNationalgalerie of mostly 19th-century art, were saved, the Neues Museum, was a burned-out shell until the 1990s.

Visiting the museum today, many people may be almost as enthralled by the reconstruction and restoration work carried out on it by the UK architect David Chipperfield in the early 2000s as by the collections it houses themselves. The museum re-opened to the public in 2009 after having been little more than a collection of blackened walls since the end of World War II in what for many was at once an emotionally engaging as well as intellectually satisfying event.

Built in the early decades of the 19th century to designs by the Prussian architect August Stueler, the museum is an important example not only of the neo-classical architecture of the time but also of the cultural and educational ambitions of the then Prussian state.

Latecomers to Egyptology as to many other disciplines, the Prussian authorities of the time wanted to establish Berlin as something more than simply the capital of a country that had only recently been recognised as one of the European powers and to turn it into a centre of culture and the arts that could compete with more-established centres such as London and Paris.

Stueler’s designs for the Neues Museum and his teacher Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s plans for the historical city-centre of Berlin were supposed not only to provide the country with institutions that could potentially rival those to be found in other countries abroad, but also to combat Prussian provinciality, something already attempted in the 18th century by the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great.

Chipperfield’s reconstruction of the museum after much of it was destroyed in World War II did not seek to restore it to what it would have looked like before 1945. Instead, he reconstructed the building as far as possible to the original plan, while saving what could be saved of the original decoration, bearing in mind that most of this was irrecoverably destroyed.

The result is a building that while it has emerged from the ashes of World War II still bears its scars upon it. The past has not been smoothed over or denied, and the Neues Museum today is as much a place of memory and reflection on the German and European past as it is a place to display the recovered artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean civilisations now in the German national collections.

HUMBOLDT FORUM: The Weekly party had visited the Neues Museum shortly after its historic re-opening in 2009 on an earlier visit to Berlin, so on this occasion it made instead for the neighbouring Humboldt Forum, the city’s new anthropology museum that opened its doors to the public in 2021.

Visitors to Berlin before 1989 when it was still a divided city will remember the East German Parliament building that previously stood on this site, and those who visited slightly later in the 1990s and 2000s will remember either the sad spectacle of this building, almost as iconic a symbol of the East German state as the television tower that still dominates Berlin’s neighbouring Alexanderplatz, standing empty and boarded up in the 1990s, or the empty plot of land after its demolition in the early 2000s.

Today, this plot houses the Humboldt Forum, itself occupying the whole of a recreation of the former Prussian royal palace that stood on the site until its destruction and subsequent demolition during and after World War II. This was the palace in which the former German Kaiser Wilhelm II plotted the outbreak of World War I and from which the first German republic was declared in November 1918.

The decision to rebuild it to scale on the original site, producing a replica of at least the façadeof the original building, was taken in the early 2000s, and despite some protests at the demolition of the East German Parliament building, a significant relic of the former East Germany, and the creation of a replica historical building in its place that is strongly associated with the discredited Hohenzollern Dynasty that ruled Germany after 1870, the building work nevertheless went ahead.

The result is a kind of gleaming pastiche of the original building, which, unlike the surviving buildings that surround it, with some of which it shares a common architectural style, it is unmarked by time and the events that came with it, having been quite literally put up less than a decade ago. It makes an intriguing contrast to Chipperfield’s reconstruction of the nearby Neues Museum, where a decision was made not to rebuild the museum in its original form but instead to reconstruct it in such a way that the historical damage was still visible.

Whatever one may think of the new palace building, inside no expense has been spared in creating state-of-the-art facilities for Berlin’s new anthropology and Asian art museums that occupy its top two floors. Having taken in the ground floor areas that house temporary exhibition spaces, a vast lobby area, and an exhibition on the history of the building, and first floor areas that house workshop and seminar rooms and an exhibition on contemporary Berlin, visitors make their way up by escalator to the two floors of anthropological and Asian art exhibitions where everything is on a suitably palatial scale.

The Humboldt Forum houses the collections of two former German museums, the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Museum of Asian Art, and these have been redisplayed in their new home using the full repertoire of contemporary design, making these two floors a thrilling visual and auditory journey for visitors.

One floor houses collections from the former Berlin Ethnological Museum, now redisplayed in an enfilade of enormous rooms divided into African, American, and Oceania areas and holding items brought back by German expeditions in mostly the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Maps, films, open storage areas, and traditional museum cases are used to frame and display the collections, and there is a significant emphasis both on provenance — how the items were collected and how they came to be in Berlin — and on understanding the pieces in the context of the societies that produced them. This is a gesture towards learning more about them and continuing the conversation, taking place today in most European anthropological museums, regarding the role of such museums now that the 19th-century collecting that produced them has been discredited or called into question.

The museum’s presentation of its collection of “Benin Bronzes”— bronze statues from the Kingdom of Benin in what is now Nigeria — says that ownership of these items has been transferred back to the Nigerian authorities, for example. The Bronzes, acquired through purchase after the destruction of the Kingdom of Benin by a British military expedition in the 1890s, are now considered to be on loan to the museum by Nigeria while work continues to reconstruct their meanings both in their original context and possibly also in their new and perhaps temporary context in a European ethnological collection.

Throughout, in fact, there is careful reference both to provenance, how and where the items were collected, and to the historical and contemporary meanings of the objects on display. The museum’s collection of Islamic art has been curated with input from Berlin’s Muslim community, for example, and a neighbouring room, titled simply “Loot”, focuses on the sometimes violent ways in which artefacts were originally brought to Berlin through stories of collecting campaigns from the Napoleonic period in Europe onwards.

There is so much to see at the Humboldt Forum that visitors could easily spend several days exploring it, presumably an aim of its designers who have provided ample food and beverage opportunities as well as exhibitions that stimulate both the intellect and the senses. The Weekly party spent most of the day there on their visit to Berlin, also deciding to come back again on every subsequent visit.

NEUES MUSEUM:Entry to the Neues Museum today is by an underground passage from the neighbouring James Simon Galerie, apparently as part of plans to link up the separate institutionson Museum Island with the Galerie serving as a visitor centre.

While this no doubt makes sense in terms of creating a route through the Island’s different institutions, joining them up for visitors, it has the disadvantage of creating a new entry for the Neues Museum through a kind of underground tunnel issuing in the basement level and bypassing Stueler’s original ground-floor entrance.

Some visitors will regret this, as the arrangement of the collections makes much more sense when approached through the ground-floor doors, with items brought back by the 19th-century German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann from his excavations at the site of Troy in what is now northwest Turkey occupying rooms to the left of the main entrance hall and the prologue to the ancient Egyptian collections occupying others to the right of it.

Most of the ancient Egyptian collection is on the museum’s ground floor, though there are also displays on the basement level illustrating themes such as “daily life”, the “Nile Valley environment”, and ancient Egyptian “belief systems”, particularly as these had to do with the “afterworld”. On the first floor, visitors move through rooms dedicated to themes such as the “Pharaoh”, the “Egyptian Temple”, “Thirty Centuries” of ancient Egyptian history, and “Eternal Life”.

The display is never less than absorbing and intellectually stimulating, with Room 109 on “Thirty Centuries” (around 3000 to 150 BCE) being perhaps particularly fascinating, showing the presentation of the human face over the millennia of ancient Egyptian art. The rooms themselves, bearing all the scars of their World War II history with Chipperfield filling in with an understated modern vocabulary of wooden panelling and polished and unpolished concrete, make a uniformly fascinating background to the objects on display.

One thing that may strike visitors, however, perhaps particularly those primed by the emphasis on the provenance of the collections that is such a feature of the neighbouring Humboldt Forum or in other ways, is the comparative lack of such information in the Neues Museum. The labelling here, though informative about the objects on display, does not give information about where and under what circumstances they were collected, something that may go against the grain of contemporary practice.

This is perhaps particularly evident when visitors approach the glass case containing the bust of Nefertiti, set apart in a room of its own on the museum’s first floor in the context of a presentation of art from ancient Egypt’s Amarna Period.

One would never guess from the description of this object in the Neues Museum that the circumstances under which Borchardt acquired and exported the bust from Egypt have been extensively criticised or that the repatriation of the bust itself has been requested by the Egyptian authorities for years.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly