Egyptian Museum of Berlin

Listen to your footsteps for a moment. The floors here sound different from room to room. In one hall your shoes meet polished stone, and in the next they meet rough, bare brick. Look up, and you may see old plaster beside clean new walls, with scorch marks and bullet scars left in place. You are standing inside the Neues Museum on Museum Island, and the building itself is the first object in the Egyptian collection that you should study.

The Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection is one of the great collections of ancient Egyptian art outside Egypt. Its works cover thousands of years. There are carved stone faces, painted coffins, tools, jewellery, and fragile sheets of papyrus covered in script. Many visitors come for one famous face. But the collection is far wider than a single queen. It is worth slowing down and letting the smaller rooms hold your attention too.

First, the building. The Neues Museum, which means simply the New Museum, was designed by the Prussian architect Friedrich August Stüler. It was built in the middle of the nineteenth century, at a time when Berlin wanted to show itself as a city of learning. The original interiors were richly decorated. Some rooms carried painted scenes that matched the objects on display, so Egyptian halls had Egyptian motifs on the walls. Traces of that painted world still survive today.

Then came the Second World War. Bombing raids hit Museum Island hard, and this building suffered some of the worst damage. Whole sections collapsed. For decades afterwards, the museum stood as a ruin in what was then East Berlin. Weeds grew in the courtyards. Rain fell into rooms that had once held pharaohs. It is a strange thought... a museum about the ancient past became a ruin of its own.

Rebuilding finally began after German reunification. The British architect David Chipperfield led the project, and the museum reopened in 2009. His approach surprised many people. He did not try to recreate the old building as if the war had never happened. Instead, he kept the damaged surfaces and added new, plain walls where the old ones were lost. The result is a building that shows its own history openly. Old and new sit side by side, and you can always tell which is which.

Now, to the most visited object in the museum — the painted bust of Queen Nefertiti. She was the chief wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt in the fourteenth century before Christ. The bust was found in 1912 by a German expedition led by the archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt. It was excavated at Amarna, the city Akhenaten built as his new capital. The bust came from the workshop of a sculptor, which means it may have been a studio model rather than a finished public monument.

Stand in front of her and look closely at her eyes. Here is a detail many visitors miss at first. One eye has an inlay of quartz with a dark pupil. The other eye socket is empty. Scholars have discussed why for a long time, and there is no single agreed answer. Some think the second inlay was never added. Either way, the missing eye makes the face feel slightly unfinished, and somehow more human.

The bust is also a subject of ongoing debate. Egyptian officials and campaigners have asked for its return to Egypt more than once over the years. They question how the object left the country after the excavation. German institutions have so far kept it in Berlin. You do not need to take a side to see why the question matters. Museums like this one are now places where people discuss who owns the past, not only places to look at it.

The bust belongs to a wider story — the Amarna period. Akhenaten made a dramatic change in Egyptian religion. He placed one god, the sun disc called the Aten, above the traditional gods. Art changed with him. Figures from this time often have long faces, narrow chins, and soft, rounded bodies. As you walk through the Amarna rooms, look for family scenes. Some carvings show the king and queen with their daughters in relaxed, affectionate poses, which was unusual in royal Egyptian art.

Keep an eye out for a small wooden head of Queen Tiye, Akhenaten's mother. It is far smaller than Nefertiti, yet many experts consider it just as remarkable. Her face is serious, almost stern, with heavy eyelids and a downturned mouth. It feels like a portrait of a real, strong-willed woman. Seeing the two queens in the same museum is a quiet surprise. One is famous for ideal beauty, the other for sharp character.

The second part of the museum's name is often forgotten — the Papyrus Collection. Papyrus is a writing material made from reeds that grew along the Nile. Berlin holds a very large collection of written texts from ancient Egypt and the wider ancient world. They include letters, contracts, religious texts, and school exercises. Only a small part can be shown at once, because papyrus is fragile and sensitive to light. But even a few sheets bring you close to ordinary people, writing down their worries and their business.

Outside the Amarna rooms, give time to the older and later pieces. There are stone statues of officials, carved with calm, steady faces meant to last forever. There are coffins painted inside and out with protective spells. There is also a hard green stone head, often called the Berlin Green Head, from a much later period of Egyptian history. Its realistic face, with lines on the forehead and around the eyes, shows how varied Egyptian portraits could be.

If you have time, walk out of the galleries and look at the building from outside. Museum Island is a group of museums on the River Spree, and the whole island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The modern James Simon Gallery, with its pale stone columns, now acts as a main entrance for several of the museums. From the colonnades, you can look across at the dark walls of the Neues Museum and see how carefully the repaired facade was patched.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment in one of the brick halls. Notice the air, cool and quiet, and the way voices drop to a murmur. Around you are objects made more than three thousand years ago, inside a building that was nearly lost less than a century ago. Both have been damaged. Both have been carefully kept. As you step back into the streets of Mitte, take that thought with you, and look at the city's own scars a little differently.