Recurrence of Pharaonic stone slab returned to Berlin Museum

CAIRO – 6 June 2017: An ancient Egyptian Pharaonic stone slab was returned to the Berlin Museum in Germany, after 70 years, where it was thought to be lost during World War II.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which supervises all the state-run museums in Berlin, announced that a piece of stone slabs had been found at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the central campus of the University of Michigan.

The stone tablet, covered with Egyptian blue glass rock, depicts Batahmos, who was the mayor of Memphis during King Rames II era, who ruled during the 13th century BC. Despite the broken pieces of the stone tablet, the image of Batahmos remains visible.

‘’The Kelsey museum had decided to return the stone slab to Berlin, where it will be shown by mid-June,’’ said Dutch scientist Nico Staring, a researcher at Leiden University. The president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Hermann Parzinger, said in a statement that the return of the stone slab was a "noble gesture."

The Neues Museum in Berlin was destroyed by air raids during the Second World War. The Museum building was left completely ruined. It was reopened in 2009, after renovation and development.

When the museum was closed at the beginning of the World War II, the Egyptian stone slab, bought from an English collection in 1910, was listed as one of the missing artifacts after the war.

This stone slab is not the first piece to return back to the Neues Museum in Berlin. In 2010, construction workers digging a subway line in central Berlin found a cache of modernist statues that the Nazis considered "deteriorating art." Later archaeologists also found 11 statues.