# The Berlin bust is catalogued as Nefertiti without a cartouche on the object

Date: 1913

## The fact

From the 1913 catalogue onward the painted bust has been published as [Nefertiti](/people/nefertiti) although the object itself bears no cartouche. The attribution is a completed scholarly statement, not a laboratory identification. It is stored as a statement-type Fact about naming, not as a DNA result.

## Context

Workshop context and likeness to inscribed images support the name. Honest catalogues still mark the lack of writing on the piece. Over-certainty feeds both tourism and restitution rhetoric.

Nefertiti is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

SMB labels and Britannica both use the name while noting the find context. The missing cartouche is the limit.

Official or archival record: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin — Neues Museum (https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/neues-museum/home.html; SMB / Neues Museum).

## Significance

Low-confidence opacity path in cultural institutions. Do not treat as a fraud judgment.

Uncertainty is not a smear.

## What is established and what is not

Established: the bust is uninscribed and catalogued as Nefertiti. Not established: that the name is false, or that it is proven by text on the stone.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Nefertiti: https://factrail.ai/people/nefertiti

## Drivers

- Institutional Corruption: https://factrail.ai/drivers/institutional-corruption

## Sources

- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nefertiti
- https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/neues-museum/home.html

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/eg-uninscribed-bust-identification-risk