The Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) will form a committee to be headed by Nabil el-Arabi, head of the International Arbitration Center and former judge at the International Court of Justice, to prepare a legal request for the return of the Nefertiti bust from Berlin museum.

New tests show the limestone and plaster bust of Queen Nefertiti is too fragile to fly home to Egypt for a temporary exhibition, the Berlin museum that owns the disputed artwork said Tuesday. It issued the statement two days after the Egyptian Museum's director, Friederike Seyfried, met in Cairo with Egypt's antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass. She said she did not negotiate over the 3,500-year-old bust with Hawass.

German authorities on Monday again rebuffed Egyptian claims to the rightful ownership of a 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti, after a high-level meeting in Cairo. Friederike Seyfried, director of the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection at the Neues Museum in the German capital, said Cairo had clear evidence that Berlin's acquisition of the priceless sculpture nearly a century ago was legal.

The talks between Zahi Hawass and the director of the Egyptian Papyrus Collection Friederike Seyfried at Berlin's Neues Museum has been postponed to december 20, 2009.

A German antiquities expert will attend talks next month to discuss Egypt’s demand for the return of a 3,500-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s antiquities council, said that a meeting planned in Egypt on Dec. 8 to discuss the possession of the statue would be attended by the director of the Egyptian antiquities department at the Berlin museum.

The Nefertiti sculpture has been in Germany since 1913. But it is only now that Egypt is demanding that this fragile and haunting object, perched alone in a domed room that overlooks the length of the museum, be returned. In interviews with Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger and Spiegel Online, Mr. Hawass said that an official investigation had begun into how Nefertiti arrived in Germany. “If she left Egypt illegally, which I am convinced she did, then I will officially demand it back from Germany,” he said in both interviews.

More than 60 years after it suffered severe bomb damage during the second world war, Berlin’s Neues Museum reopened on Friday, providing the priceless 3350 year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti with a new home. Ravaged by the weather and neglected by east Germany’s communist authorities after the war, the Neues Museum has been lovingly restored by David Chipperfield, the British architect, over a period of six years and at a cost of more than €200m.

An ancient Egyptian bust of Queen Nefertiti has been moved back to the Berlin museum that exhibited it before the Second World War. The 3,500-year-old sculpture was installed in the renovated Neues Museum on Sunday, museum officials said Monday.

The bust of Queen Nefertiti housed in a Berlin museum and believed to be 3,400 years old in fact is a copy dating from 1912 that was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians, according to Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin. He says in a just-released book that the bust currently in Berlin's Altes Museum was made on the orders of Germany archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt on site at the digs by an artist named Gerardt Marks.

Using CT imaging to study the bust of Nefertiti, researchers have uncovered a delicately carved face in the limestone inner core and gained new insights into methods used to create the ancient masterpiece and information pertinent to its conservation.