Aidan Dodson

Probably about three years after that, the royal family give up living there and return to their old palaces.

And at that point, everything just shut up and left.

Because, of course, by this time, Akhenaten's dead.

Nefertiti might be dead as well.

So there's no actual point in taking this stuff with you.

So they effectively just sort of lock the door and just leave it.

And it all then just decays over the next...

next few decades.

Apparently, it was reckoned that the bust had been on a wooden shelf, which had then finally decayed a decade or so later on, and it had fallen to the floor.

Luckily, by that time, sand had blown into the workshop to break the fall, whereas the corresponding Akhenaten one clearly didn't fall on a pile of sand and ended up shattering.

You can actually still see it in Berlin.

It looks very horrible because they've just sort of had to try and stick it back together again with a few of the bits completely pulverised.

There was no need for it anymore.

It had been the master model for sculptors.

Nobody was producing sculptures of Nefertiti anymore, so just leave it behind.

At that period, the basic rules were that the excavator got half their finds, the Egyptian government got the other half of the finds, except for exceptional pieces whereby Egypt had the first claim on those.

And what would happen at the end of the season is that one of the Egyptian Antiquities Service inspectors would come and look at what had been found and would sign off, yes or no, whether various things should stay or go.

The story is that on the actual list that was given to the inspector, the Nefertiti bust was listed as being made of plaster,

rather than being a sculpture, because there was a whole load of other plaster pieces.

The other thing is that it's been suggested that he wasn't given a very good look at the stuff.