Aidan Dodson

I'm not an artist, but I suspect that if you're going to do something like that, you need to at least have the basic bone structure, if you like, in stone underneath to then be able to veer and haul on the...

I've heard that story.

How true it actually is, I'm not 100% sure.

And also the wildcats of scanning being done in the museum gallery is physically impossible.

And it was admitted later on that the whole thing was a scam.

So there's a whole lot of these stories around about the head which one can't necessarily verify.

And also, actually, it's not actually unique amongst them.

There is an amazing unfinished quartzite head of Nefertiti, which is in Cairo, which was found by a British expedition about 20 years after the Berlin bust, which for me is the same face.

And in some ways, it's even more gorgeous because it was going to be one with inlaid eyes, but they never got around to doing that.

So you've just simply got the quartzite carved face with almost black eyeliner, almost, marking where they're going to be removing the stone from it.

So...

I think that the Nefertiti one is particularly immediate because of its colouring, but there are also lots of other ones which have been produced which are perhaps less immediate because of the lack of colouring.

What we think is a portrait, things they look like portraits, but...

We can't be 100% sure they are.

They may simply be what people really want it to look like.

So therefore, she may not have been quite as beautiful as that, but this has been sort of been tweaked a little bit.

So it looks amazingly naturalistic compared with a lot of Egyptian art, but it may still be a question of this is how she wanted to...

She wanted to look to the public.

I bet she did.

I would say that although everybody raves about the Berlin head, this Cairo one is my favourite, quite honestly.