NEW YORK—It’s hard to imagine Queen Nefertiti speaking with a German accent, but a Swiss art historian is claiming that a delicate bust of the Egyptian monarch in Berlin that was thought to date back to 1347 BC is in fact a 20th-century imposter.

Henri Stierlin says the bust was made by an artist named Gerardt Marks at the request of Ludwig Borchardt, an archaeologist, for research purposes. On December 6, 1912, a German prince admired the statue as an original, the story goes, and Borchardt didn’t have the heart to correct him.

The historian gave several bits of evidence to support his claim. Among them: The bust has only one eye and was not crafted to include the other one, which would have been offensive in ancient Egypt; its shoulders were cut vertically, reminiscent of Art Nouveau styling rather than the typical horizontal orientation of Egyptian works; and archaeologists at the site where the bust was said to have been found did not mention it at the time.

German scientists recently discovered a second face under the surface of the bust, suggesting that the features of the statue were adjusted for some reason.

It would be ironic if the work were fake: Egypt has been trying to get it back for years. Nefertiti was the wife of the 18th-dynasty Pharaoh Akhenaton, and together they were known for efforts to bring monotheism to Egypt with the worship of one sun god, Aton.

The bust is currently on view at Berlin’s Altes Museum and is scheduled to move to the Neues Museum when the institution reopens in October. Stierlin told ARTINFO that he had suspected the statue was not an antiquity as far back as 1983 but has recently refined his analysis and wanted to come public with it before the opening of the new museum.