Britain Returns Sculpture

She came in disguise, but ultimately there was no hiding her true royal character. After painstaking research, Britain on Friday returned a valuable 13th century B.C. sculpture of the head of an ancient Egyptian queen, stolen a decade ago by a British antiquities smuggler. The marble head of Nefertari, principal queen of Ramses II, was disguised as a cheap tourist souvenir to smuggle it out of Egypt in the early 1990s. The Egyptian government went to court in Britain to pursue the private dealer who later bought the piece, but he maintained he didn’t have to return it because it was a fake. Tests by the British Museum proved it was genuine and the man relinquished it.