Tomb of Nefertari

Cool air meets you at the top of the stairs. Outside, the desert light is white and hard, and the limestone hills of the west bank glow pale gold. Then you step down, and the colour changes completely. Deep blue ceilings. Yellow stars. Skin painted in warm ochre, linen painted so fine you can almost see the light through it. You have entered the burial place of a queen who died more than three thousand years ago.

This is the Tomb of Nefertari, in the Valley of the Queens, on the west bank of the Nile across from modern Luxor. Egyptologists catalogue it as QV66. The ancient Egyptians called this valley Ta-Set-Neferu, often translated as the place of beauty. It is a quiet, dry wadi, a desert ravine cut into the cliffs, where royal wives and children of the New Kingdom were buried. Of all the tombs here, this one carries the most complete and colourful painting.

Nefertari was the Great Royal Wife of Ramesses the Second, one of the longest-reigning and most ambitious pharaohs in Egyptian history. They lived in the thirteenth century before Christ. Her name means something close to beautiful companion. Ramesses honoured her in public in a way few kings honoured their queens. Far to the south, at Abu Simbel, he carved a whole temple for her and the goddess Hathor, with her statues standing as tall as his own.

So who was she as a person? Honestly, we know less than we would like. Letters survive showing that she corresponded with the royal court of the Hittites, the great rival empire to the north. That suggests a queen with a real diplomatic role. But her birth family, her exact age, and the cause of her death are still debated. What she left us most clearly is this tomb... and it was painted to carry her safely into eternity.

Look first at the walls around you. The tomb was cut into a poor-quality limestone, cracked and uneven. So the builders did not carve the scenes directly into the rock. Instead, they covered the walls with a layer of plaster, shaped the figures in low relief within that plaster, and then painted them. This is part of why the colours look so soft and rich. It is also why the tomb has always been fragile.

Here is the first surprise. The paintings you see today almost did not survive. Salt inside the rock slowly pushed through the plaster over the centuries, forming crystals that lifted the paint away in flakes. By the twentieth century, whole sections were in danger. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservators from the Getty Conservation Institute worked with Egyptian authorities to stabilise the surfaces. Their approach was careful. They secured what remained and did not repaint the lost areas.

That is why you will notice blank patches in places — plain plaster where paint has gone. Those gaps are honest. Everything with colour is ancient. The blues, the greens, the reds, and the yellows were made from minerals and pigments ground by hand. The white backgrounds make the figures stand out like they are lit from within. When you look closely, you are seeing the brushwork of painters who worked here by lamplight.

Now find the queen herself. She appears again and again, always slim and graceful, often wearing a long white robe and a headdress shaped like a vulture, a symbol linked to queens and to the goddess Mut. In one well-known scene she sits alone at a board game called senet, a game of moves along a grid. For Egyptians, the game could also stand for the journey of the soul through the dangers of the afterlife.

In other scenes, gods take her by the hand. Isis, the great mother goddess, leads her forward. She stands before Osiris, lord of the dead, and before other deities, offering gifts. The figures are calm and still. Nobody rushes. Around them, columns of hieroglyphs run down the walls. Many of these come from texts we often call the Book of the Dead — spells to help the deceased pass each test and gate on the road to eternal life.

The second surprise is in the structure of the tomb. It is not one long corridor. There are upper rooms first, then a steep descending passage leading down to the burial chamber. That lower hall has four square pillars. On some pillar faces you will see the djed pillar, a symbol of stability linked to Osiris and his backbone. Each part of the tomb works like a stage in the queen's journey from this world to the next.

The tomb was not found untouched. Robbers entered it in ancient times and took almost everything of value. When the Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli opened it in 1904, he found only a few remains. These included pieces of the granite sarcophagus lid, small funerary figures, and a pair of sandals. Many of those objects are now in the Egyptian Museum in Turin. Fragments of legs found there have been studied, and researchers think they probably belonged to the queen herself.

Because the paintings are so delicate, visits are carefully controlled. Your own breath and body heat add moisture to the air, and moisture is what the salt needs to move. So the time you spend inside is limited, and groups are kept small. It is worth using those minutes slowly. Do not try to see everything. Choose two or three scenes and look at the faces, the hands, and the fine lines of the eyes.

As you climb back up the stairs, the colour falls away behind you, and the dry heat of the valley returns. Listen for the quiet out here — wind across rock, footsteps on gravel, perhaps a distant voice from another tomb. The hills around you hold dozens of other burials, most of them far plainer. For a queen whose life we know only in pieces, this small underground space still carries her name, her image, and the care of everyone who once worked to protect her.