“Thousands of Berliners had waited in line to see the Neues Museum reopen to the public but Egyptians had waited almost a century for her return.”
– Historian
Sarah E. Bond, on the century-plus saga of cultural plunder that began with the excavation and depatriation of the
Nefertiti bust in 1912. In an article that
starts as a chronicle of cultural colonialism, Bond uses
Nora Al-Badri and
Jan Nikolai Nelle’s 2015 3D-scan of the bust to raise broader questions of heritage and sovereignty.