01/08/2021
Who was Dr. Henri James SIMON ?
The first donation of Nefertiti’s bust in 1920 to the Berliner Museum was done ✅
by Dr. SIMON after keeping her in his house for 7 years ( from 1913 to 1920 )
Dr. Henri James Simon the first owner in Germany of Nefertiti’s bust (1913) especially shared an interest for archaeology with Wilhelm II and in 1898 was one of the founders of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in collaboration with Wilhelm von Bode, and in 1901 the emperor himself assumed the auspices. In 1911 Simon provided the financing of Ludwig Borchardt's excavations at Pharaoh Akhenaten's city in Amarna, whereafter large parts of the found artefacts including the busts of Nefertiti and Tiye passed into his ownership, according to a – still disputed – 1913 partition treaty with the Egyptian Département des antiquités under Gaston Maspero. He added them to his private collections at his villa on Tiergartenstraße No. 15a, of which in his later years he dedicated various parts as permanent loans for public display, at first to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum opened in 1904, the major donations to the Egyptian Museum followed in 1920.
Dr.Simon died in Berlin 1932 , just one year before Adolf Hi**er come to Power !!
Hi**er who definitely refused the restitution of the bust to King Fouad !!
« Même le Dr. Henri James Simon s’est prononcé en faveur du retour «His last public intervention was a letter to the Prussian Minister of Culture in which he campaigned for the return of the bust of Nefertiti to Egypt. » Alexandra Karg in The Collector, August 7, 2019.. »
“ On the other hand EVEN giving away the Colourful Bust of Nefertiti to Egypt , the Berlin Museum would still be far superior to all other collections, including that in Cairo as regards the number and artistic value of the artworks from the Amarna period . And among our stock are many pieces that are of higher artistic rank than the elegant bust of the colorful Queen . “
Dr. James Simon ,
28th June 1930
(Henri) James Simon
(17 September 1851 – 23 May 1932 )
