I remember when Barbara first told me about starting The Painted Queen. “You’ll never guess what I am going to tackle next! It will be such fun, and hopefully set the cat among the pigeons—and everyone will be happy as we are going back to Amarna!” From that moment on, she embarked on a frenzy of research, reading all she could on the topic, whether it was Borchardt’s excavation reports, diaries and letters from the time, newspaper reports about the appearance and disappearance of Nefertiti, the opinions of scholars past and present about the bust, or websites dealing with the exit and return of Nefertiti. All the while she kept track of what Egypt and Europe were like in the early part of the twentieth century. She also polled her Egyptological friends, asking their opinions about Borchardt’s character, whether German governmental officials might have conspired to remove Nefertiti illegally from Egypt and keep her in Germany, and their thoughts on the accuracy of modern studies on the Nefertiti bust. Barbara’s Egyptological friends entered into the spirit of the book by sending her any relevant material that they thought might be of interest, whether it was a new book in German about the history of the German Institute that figures prominently in this book (the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, at that time) or obscure notes and opinions about the queen and her excavators, or by visiting the actual house that belonged to the German Institute in Cairo, and where Nefertiti might have temporarily rested (and where people were imprisoned).