The world famous bust of queen Nefertiti on display in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin.
Her elegant and chiselled features held proud and high on a swanlike neck, she has been smiling serenely for 3,400 years. At least that has long been the popular and scientific belief that draws half a million tourists to see her in Berlin every year.
But now doubt has been thrown on the authenticity of the painted limestone and plaster bust of the 18th dynasty Egyptian queen Nefertiti by two authors who claim she is a fake.
According to a Swiss art historian, the bust is less than 100 years old. Henri Stierlin has said the stunning work that will later this year be the showpiece of the city's reborn Neues Museum was created by an artist commissioned by Ludwig Borchardt, the German archaeologist credited with digging Nefertiti out of the sands of the ancient settlement of Amarna, 90 miles south of Cairo, in 1912.
In his book, Le Buste de Nefertiti – une Imposture de l'Egyptologie? (The Bust of Nefertiti – an Egyptology Fraud?), Stierlin has claimed that the bust was created to test ancient pigments. But after it was admired by a Prussian prince, Johann Georg, who was beguiled by Nefertiti's beauty, Borchardt, said Stierlin, "didn't have the nerve to make his guest look stupid" and pretended it was genuine.
Berlin author and historian Edrogan Ercivan has added his weight to the row with his book Missing Link in Archaeology, published last week, in which he has also called Nefertiti a fake, modelled by an artist on Borchardt's statuesque wife.
Public and political enthusiasm about the find at the time gave the artefact its "own dynamic" and led to Borchardt ensuring it was kept out of the public gaze until 1924, the authors have argued.
He kept it in his living room for the next 11 years before handing it over to a Berlin museum, since when it has been one of the city's main tourist attractions.
The statue was famously admired by Adolf Hitler, who referred to it as "a unique masterpiece, an ornament, a true treasure".
Recent radiological tests carried out on the statue by Berlin's Charite hospital supposedly proved that the bust is indeed more than 3,000 years old. The tests uncovered a hidden face carved into the statue's limestone core. But Stierlin has argued that while it is possible to carbon date the pigments, which appear to be ancient Egyptian, it is impossible to accurately date the bust because it is made of stone covered in plaster.
Other aspects of the find, which he has claimed support his theory, are the facts that the bust has no left eye, which the ancient Egyptians would have considered a sign of disrespect towards their much-loved queen, and that the first scientific reports on the discovery were not written up for 11 years.
Borchardt's diary entries remain the main written account of the find. He wrote: "Suddenly we had in our hands the most alive Egyptian artwork. You cannot describe it with words. You must see it."
