Following the September Clergy & Ladies Night, President Eddie Piekut entertained – or was that educated? – all present as he posed the arguments for and against the Nefertiti Bust being a fake or real.
Nefertiti was a royal wife of the Pharoah, Akhenaten who ruled Egypt in the 14th century B.C. One of her daughters married the future Pharoah, Tutankhamun, Nefertiti’s stepson..
Made of painted limestone, the bust of Nefertiti is believed to date from around 1345 BC. The name Nefertiti means “the beautiful one has arrived ” and the bust is of a very beautiful lady. However whilst black painted quartz forms the iris of the right eye , there is an empty eye socket for the left eye of the bust.
Discovered by a German archaeological team led by Ludwig Borchardt in Egypt in 1912, the bust is now held in the Neues Museum in Berlin.In recent years, it has been claimed that the bust is in fact a modern fake, created by an artist commissioned by Borchardt. One of the arguments for this is that the missing left eye of the bust would have been a sign of disrespect to the Queen in ancient Egypt.
Eddie gave the arguments for and against it being a fake and even produced his own copy of the bust The vote afterwards was mainly in favour of it being genuine.
