Museumsinsel in Berlin

The Egyptian Museum at the Museuminsel is one of the three best Egyptian museums in Europe. Its shares this position with the Egyptian departments of Le Louvre and the British Museum. Visiting Berlin without seeing the famous bust of Nefertiti would be as sad as visiting Paris without seeing La Joconde-Mona Lisa! The Egyptian Museum, now located in the Neues Museum at the Museuminsel, reopened on 16th of October 2009. The collection consists of 45.000 objects. Most famous are the bust of Nefertiti, the sculpture with the head of Queen Tiy and the so called "Berlin Green Head". There is also a papyrus collection with 60.000 texts in various scripts.I visited twice the Egyptian collection when it was located in Charlottenburg. So I can not comment the present lay out but I can say that it is a wonderful collection of Egyptian art. Indeed it seemed to me that in Berlin priority was given to the aesthetical value of the exposed artefacts. Le Louvre and British Museum are more oriented towards artefacts and objects of daily life in Egypt.NEW. Nefertiti arrived in Berlin a century ago. Mr. Zahi Hawass, chief of the Antiquities in Cairo, is now aggressively claiming its return to Egypt. The case of the bust of Nefertiti is poisoning the relations between Egypt and Germany.
Nefertiti is not the only artifact claimed by Mr. Hawass; there are some thousand objects he wants to get back. It sounds a bit strange knowing that the Egyptian museums have already no room to display thousands and thousands antic objects.