Sunday 29 May 2011

Head of Nefertiti embroiled in German court ruling on Egyptian artifacts

The legal complexities surrounding the University of Leipzig's Egyptology collection could become even more tangled, it seems.

Last week a German court ruled that the University of must hand over its collection of 150 Egyptian artifacts to the Jewish Claims Conference.

Among the objects are the Ebers Papyrus, a medical papyrus purchased by George Ebers, and a small limestone head of the queen Nefertiti, wife of the monotheistic king Akhenaten.

The University of Leipzig bought the ccollection in 1936 from a Jewish professor, Professor Georg Steindorff. The court said Steindorff had been forced to sell his collection under Nazi rule for a value far below its actual worth.

Now Leipzig residents are angry the museum would be losing its collection, and under this pressure the Leipzig University is to appeal against the court ruling.

Meanwhile, Zahi Hawass, Minister of State for Antiquities, has sent an official letter to the Jewish Claims Conference - an umbrella alliance of 24 international Jewish organizations seeking compensation for Holocaust victims and their descendants - demanding restitution of these objects, and threatened to file a lawsuit against it before German and international courts if the JCC did not comply.

Georg Steindorff had held Leipzig's Egyptology chair and emigrated from Nazi Germany to the US where he died in 1951. The professor had collected the antiquities on research trips.

For more Click HERE

See: University must surrender collection of Egyptian antiquities

4 comments:

  1. Just to let you know I've removed some comments from this post. I don't like censorship but I think views were moving beyond Egyptology and some of the words used were not very considered.

    I do understand passions can run very high but please be considerate to everyone when posting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. May I just say that the Papyrus Ebers is not part of the Steindorff collection and was never threatened to be removed from the University library. The Steindorff collection makes up only a small part of the university's Egyptian collection and not all objects would have had to be given away.

    ReplyDelete