A Sealed Door and Thirty-Eight Fragments of a Queen
1904. The Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli, working with a small Egyptian crew in a side wadi south of the Valley of the Kings, clears the rubble from a sealed doorway twenty feet beneath the desert floor. The seal is intact. The cartouche on the plaster names a woman dead for 3,100 years — Nefertari Meritmut, Great Royal Wife of Ramesses II.
Schiaparelli pushes through.
The first chamber opens into a cascade of painted walls so vivid the colours appear wet. Stars on the ceiling, gold against dark blue. The queen in a transparent linen gown, playing senet against an invisible opponent. Anubis bending over a mummified body. Isis and Hathor receiving the dead woman into the underworld. A vulture goddess with her wings spread protectively across the doorframe. The plaster is intact. The paint has not faded. The colours — ochre, cobalt, malachite, lampblack, gypsum white — are as fresh as the day the artists laid them down in 1255 BCE.
The robbers had been here three thousand years earlier and taken almost everything portable. Nefertari’s mummy is gone. Her gold is gone. Her organs in their alabaster canopic jars are gone. A pair of mummified knees lie on the floor of the burial chamber. Thirty-eight fragments of human bone are scattered across the inner rooms. Schiaparelli will spend weeks cataloguing them and never determine for certain which belong to the queen. He does not have her face.
He has the walls.
The Valley of the Queens was the necropolis where the women of the New Kingdom court — the wives, the daughters, the royal sons who died as infants — were buried in a hierarchy of stone meant to outlast the empire that built it. The empire didn’t last. The tombs did. Three thousand one hundred years of grave robbery, flash flooding, fire, vandalism, Coptic refugees, and salt damage have reduced the original ninety-plus tombs to a handful of survivors. The most spectacular of them — Nefertari’s QV66 — survives largely because what made it valuable to thieves was paint, and you cannot steal paint.
Why the Egyptians Buried Their Queens in a Separate Valley
The New Kingdom Shift from Pyramids to Hidden Rock-Cut Tombs
Egyptian royal burial changed completely around 1500 BCE. For the previous thousand years, pharaohs and their consorts had been entombed in the great masonry pyramids of Giza and Saqqara, monuments deliberately visible across the desert. The visibility was the point. The pyramid announced the dead king. It also, inevitably, announced where his gold was buried.
By the start of the 18th Dynasty, every pyramid in Egypt had been robbed. Every one. The robberies were ancient and total. The Egyptians knew it. The pharaoh Ahmose I, who reunified Egypt around 1550 BCE and founded the New Kingdom, made a deliberate decision that would shape royal burial for the next five centuries: he ordered his tomb cut into a remote desert valley behind the western cliffs of Thebes, hidden, unmarked, and guarded. His successors copied him. The result was the necropolis the modern world calls the Valley of the Kings — and a kilometre to the south, in a separate side wadi, the smaller and slightly later necropolis for the royal women and children.
The logic was simple. A pyramid was a billboard. A hole in the cliff was a secret. The shift sacrificed visibility for survival. It did not work — every tomb in both valleys was robbed within centuries of being sealed — but it bought a few hundred years, and in some rare cases, like Nefertari’s, it preserved the paintings even after the gold was gone.
The Sacred Geography of the Theban West Bank and the Cobra Goddess Meresger
The west bank of the Nile, in Egyptian thought, was the kingdom of the dead. The sun set there. The dry desert preserved bodies. The cultivation ended abruptly at the cliff line, and beyond the cultivation was the realm of mortuary temples, embalming workshops, tomb-workers’ villages, and graves. The east bank, where the modern city of Luxor stands, was the realm of the living — the great temples of Karnak and Luxor, the palaces, the markets, the riverside quays. The Nile itself was the dividing line.
The cliffs above the Valley of the Queens were thought to be inhabited by a cobra goddess named Meresger — “She Who Loves Silence” — who guarded the necropolis and could strike dead anyone who entered with theft in their heart. The workmen who cut the tombs, from the village of Deir el-Medina just over the ridge, addressed prayers to her on small carved stelae. Some of these stelae survive. They thank Meresger for sparing the worshipper from blindness, from snakebite, from the consequences of perjury. The cobra was taken seriously. The workmen who entered the tombs daily believed she watched them.
She did not stop the robberies. The robberies, when they came, were carried out by men from the same village.
The Cliff Cleft That the Egyptians Called the Place of Beauty
The valley itself is a natural cleft in the limestone, roughly five hundred metres long and at its widest perhaps fifty metres across, running south-west into the cliffs from the desert floor. The Egyptians named it Ta-Set-Neferu — “the Place of the Royal Children” in its earliest form, later expanded to “the Place of Beauty.” Both meanings were operative. The valley was where the royal children, the neferu, were buried, but it was also genuinely beautiful in the Egyptian aesthetic sense: a hidden cleft, sheltered from the wind, with sheer walls of pale limestone catching the morning sun.
The first tombs were cut into the lower walls of the wadi during the early 18th Dynasty, around 1500 BCE. They were small, undecorated, and assigned mostly to anonymous princesses whose names have not survived. The valley grew over the next four centuries into a working necropolis with more than ninety known tombs, the largest concentration of royal female burials in the ancient world. Most of the tombs are no longer accessible. Many were destroyed by flooding or quarrying or Coptic reuse. A handful — five or six in any given decade — are open to visitors on a rotating basis, controlled by Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities permits. Nefertari’s QV66 is the prize. The rest are the context.
The Tombs of the 18th and 19th Dynasty Queens
The Early Queens of the 18th Dynasty and the Modest First Tombs
The earliest tombs in the valley belong to women whose names have been almost entirely erased by time. Many of them are not even clearly identified — the cartouches were scraped off the walls by later thieves or by the Coptic monks who reused the chambers in late antiquity. What survives is mostly architecture. Small, single-chamber rock-cut rooms, sometimes with a short corridor leading to them, usually with the original plaster intact but the paintings either never finished or so badly damaged that only fragments of figures remain.
The early valley was modest. The 18th Dynasty queens of greatest political importance — Hatshepsut, Tiye, Nefertiti — were buried elsewhere, in the Valley of the Kings alongside their husbands or in private tombs whose locations remain partly debated. The Valley of the Queens, in its first century, was for the secondary wives and the daughters and the children. The royal hierarchy expressed itself in geography. The most powerful women were buried with the kings. The rest came here.
This pattern shifted at the start of the 19th Dynasty.
The Children of Ramesses III: A Father Burying His Sons
The 19th Dynasty pharaoh Ramesses III outlived several of his sons. He reigned for thirty-two years, from approximately 1186 to 1155 BCE, during a period of increasing economic strain and political instability that historians sometimes call the late Bronze Age collapse. Four of his sons died young, of causes the records do not specify, during his lifetime. He buried them in the Valley of the Queens.
The tomb of Amun-her-khepeshef, his eldest son, is one of the most affecting in the valley. It is a small tomb, four chambers, the walls painted with the father leading the boy by the hand through the gates of the underworld, introducing him to the gods. Ramesses III is shown wearing the royal headdress. The boy is shown as a child, with the side-lock of youth and a small linen kilt. The father holds the son’s wrist. The gesture is gentle. The figures are smaller than royal scale in the Valley of the Kings, but they are drawn with the same precision and the same blue-black eye-paint that the royal portraitists used for the pharaoh himself.
The mummy of an infant boy, perhaps eight years old, was found in the burial chamber. The body had been mummified, wrapped, and placed in a small wooden coffin. The bones showed no sign of violence. The cause of death is unknown. The tomb is one of the few in the valley currently open to visitors.
A second son, Khaemwaset, was buried in a nearby tomb. A third, Pareherwenemef, in another. The Ramesside princes of the late 19th Dynasty form a small cluster of tombs in the central part of the valley. They are the most consistently visited group in the necropolis after Nefertari, partly because their preservation is unusually good and partly because the human story they tell is uniquely accessible. A pharaoh burying his children, in painted stone, with his own hand on theirs.
The Hierarchy of Tomb Size, Decoration, and Royal Favour
The valley operated on a strict hierarchy of stone. Tomb size, depth, number of chambers, and quality of decoration all signalled the deceased’s rank within the royal household. The wives of the reigning pharaoh received the largest tombs — three or four chambers, sometimes with a side annex, with full programmes of decoration from the Book of the Dead and the Litany of Re. Secondary wives received smaller tombs, often with partial decoration. Daughters of the king received still smaller tombs, sometimes only a single chamber. The dead infant sons of Ramesses III received tombs intermediate in size between the wives and the daughters — the political logic was that a dead prince was a dead future pharaoh, and his burial had to reflect what he might have been.
The status hierarchy was visible in pigment. The most expensive colours — Egyptian blue, made from ground calcium copper silicate, and the deep red ochres imported from the eastern desert — appear only in the highest-ranking tombs. The yellow ochres and lampblacks used in lesser tombs were locally produced and cheap. A modern visitor walking down the central corridor of the valley moves from intensely coloured walls in the principal tombs to flat, undecorated plaster in the lesser ones, the entire ancient cost structure visible in pigment.
The hierarchy did not survive death equally well. The richest tombs attracted the most determined thieves and suffered the most thorough robbery. The poorest tombs were often ignored and survive in better condition simply because there was nothing in them worth taking.
Nefertari and the Tomb That Survived 3,100 Years
Who Nefertari Was: Ramesses II’s First and Most Beloved Wife
Nefertari was the principal wife of Ramesses II, the pharaoh who ruled Egypt for sixty-six years and is conventionally called Ramesses the Great. She married him before he came to the throne, probably around 1290 BCE when he was a teenage prince and she was perhaps fifteen. She bore him at least four sons and two daughters. She accompanied him on state occasions, was depicted at his side on temple walls at Abu Simbel and Karnak, and held the formal titles “Great Royal Wife” and “Lady of the Two Lands.” She was, by every measure that can be reconstructed from the surviving inscriptions, his favourite.
The expression “favourite” is not romantic invention. Egyptian royal protocol allowed the pharaoh many wives, but distinguished sharply between the principal wife and the secondary wives. Nefertari was the principal. She was also, unusually, depicted at near-equal scale to her husband on certain monuments — a privilege normally reserved for queens regnant like Hatshepsut, not for queens consort. Ramesses built her a temple at Abu Simbel, alongside his own, with a colossal facade where Nefertari is shown at the same height as the king. The inscription on the facade reads: A temple of great and mighty monuments, for the great royal wife Nefertari Meritmut, for whose sake the very sun does shine.
She died around 1255 BCE, in her mid-forties, of causes unknown. The tomb in the Valley of the Queens had been prepared for her in advance. She was buried with the full programme of royal mortuary equipment. The robbers reached the tomb, almost certainly, within a generation.
The Construction and Painting of QV66 Around 1255 BCE
The tomb known to modern Egyptology as QV66 was cut into the limestone of the central valley to a depth of approximately twenty feet below ground level. A short flight of steps descends to an antechamber, from which two further chambers branch — a small side annex and a corridor leading to the burial chamber proper. The total floor area is roughly 520 square metres. The plan is modest by Valley of the Kings standards. The decoration is extraordinary.
The walls were prepared by the standard New Kingdom technique. A coat of mud plaster was applied to the rough limestone, smoothed, then covered with a thin layer of gypsum to produce a uniform white surface. On this surface, the scenes were drawn first in red ochre by a senior draughtsman, then corrected in black by a supervisor, then painted in by the colourists working from junior up to master. The whole programme — every wall, every ceiling, every door jamb — was completed in perhaps three months by a team of fifteen to twenty men from the village of Deir el-Medina just over the ridge.
The iconography follows the Book of the Dead. Nefertari is shown moving through the stages of the afterlife — making offerings to Osiris, receiving life from Hathor, being led through gates guarded by serpent-headed deities, eventually appearing in the company of the gods themselves. The artistic style is the high classical mode of the early 19th Dynasty, with elongated figures, intricate jewellery rendered in detailed gold leaf, and astonishingly nuanced colour. The blue of Nefertari’s collar is the deepest blue any pre-modern culture ever produced. The whites of the linen gowns are tinted with a single drop of pink. The eyes are outlined with a stroke of black that varies in thickness by less than a millimetre.
The painters left their initials in red ochre in a service corridor that was never meant to be seen. The initials survive. The painters do not.
Schiaparelli’s 1904 Excavation and What He Found
Ernesto Schiaparelli was the director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, which holds one of the most important collections of Egyptian antiquities outside Egypt itself. He had been excavating in Egypt since the 1890s, mostly under licences granted by the Egyptian Antiquities Service then administered by France. In 1903 he obtained the concession for the Valley of the Queens. In February 1904, working through the rubble of a side wadi, he uncovered a sealed doorway.
The seals on the door were intact, but the small entry shaft showed signs of an ancient break-in, hastily resealed. This was the standard pattern. Almost every “intact” tomb found in Egypt has been entered at least once and resealed by the necropolis priests after the robbery. The seals Schiaparelli found were the resealing — done perhaps a century after Nefertari’s burial, after the original robbers had taken whatever gold they could carry.
What remained was the paintings, a damaged sarcophagus lid, and the thirty-eight fragments of human bone. Schiaparelli photographed everything. He removed the most portable objects — fragments of the sarcophagus, broken shabti figurines, the pair of mummified knees, a single golden sandal — and shipped them back to Turin, where they remain. He left the paintings in place. He had nothing to do with them. The tomb was sealed against further entry and reported to the Antiquities Service.
The discovery was the most significant find in the Valley of the Queens in modern times, and it predated Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by eighteen years. It produced no comparable global publicity, for two reasons. First, the gold was already gone — there was no glittering hoard to photograph for the world’s newspapers. Second, Schiaparelli was a careful Italian scholar working in a French-administered concession, with neither the showmanship nor the British colonial publicity machine that would later magnify Carter’s find. The paintings of Nefertari became known to specialists and stayed largely unknown to the general public for most of the 20th century.
This was, on the whole, fortunate. The tomb’s obscurity preserved it.
Grave Robbery, Fire, and the Slow Destruction of the Necropolis
The Tomb Robbery Papyri of the 20th Dynasty and the Confessions of the Looters
The royal tombs of the Theban necropolis began to be systematically robbed during the reign of Ramesses IX, around 1110 BCE — within a century of the burial of the last great pharaohs. The robberies were not isolated incidents. They were organised, performed by gangs operating with inside information, often involving the necropolis workmen themselves. The Egyptian state knew this and prosecuted the crimes. A remarkable archive of papyrus court records, known to Egyptology as the Tomb Robbery Papyri, has survived from the 20th Dynasty.
The papyri record interrogations. The interrogations were conducted under torture. The accused were beaten on the soles of their feet, sometimes broken on the wheel, sometimes mutilated. The confessions were transcribed verbatim. They name the tombs entered, the gold taken, the procedure used to remove the precious metals from the wrapped mummies. One papyrus, Papyrus Mayer A, records the confession of a stonemason named Amun-pa-nefer, who was part of a gang that broke into a royal tomb in the western necropolis. He describes opening the inner chamber, finding the king’s body, stripping the gold from the bandages, and divvying up the proceeds. The text is matter-of-fact. The work was a profession. The risk was death by impalement.
The Valley of the Queens was systematically targeted. The Ramesside princes’ tombs were robbed within a generation of the burials. Nefertari’s tomb was entered, stripped, and resealed — by the same priesthood that had buried her, or by their successors a generation later, who quietly extracted the gold and replaced the seals to make the theft look ancient by the time anyone checked. The Egyptian state slowly lost control of its own necropolis. By the end of the 20th Dynasty around 1077 BCE, the systematic looting was complete.
Almost everything portable was gone. What remained was the walls.
The Coptic Christian Reuse of the Tombs in Late Antiquity
Egypt converted to Christianity in stages between the 3rd and 6th centuries CE. The desert monastic movement, which began in the Egyptian Thebaid in the 4th century, produced thousands of hermits and monks who sought out caves, hermitages, and abandoned ancient buildings as cells. The Theban necropolis, with its dozens of accessible empty tombs and dry desert climate, became a major site of Coptic monastic occupation.
The monks moved into the empty royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings, the workers’ tombs of Deir el-Medina, and the lesser tombs of the Valley of the Queens. They smoked their fires against the painted walls. They scratched Coptic crosses over the faces of the pagan gods. They wrote prayers in Greek and Coptic across the hieroglyphs. They built up earthen floors that covered the lower registers of the painted scenes. In some cases they deliberately defaced figures of Osiris, Isis, and Anubis, which their theology identified as demonic.
The damage was extensive but uneven. The tombs of the Valley of the Kings, larger and more prominent, attracted more Coptic occupation. The Valley of the Queens received less attention, partly because many of its tombs were smaller and harder to live in. Nefertari’s tomb, which had been resealed by the ancient priesthood and was no longer obviously accessible, was apparently never occupied by Coptic monks. This is one of the reasons the paintings survived in such unusual condition. The tomb had been hidden from both the late ancient world and the early Christian world. Schiaparelli was, effectively, the first person to enter it for purposes other than theft in over 3,100 years.
Flash Floods, Salt Crystallisation, and the 20th Century Conservation Crisis
The Theban hills receive almost no rainfall in most years. When rain does come, it comes as a flash flood — a violent thunderstorm dumping the year’s water into the narrow wadis in a few hours, with no vegetation to slow the runoff. The Valley of the Queens has flooded perhaps a dozen times since antiquity. Each flood pushed mud and debris into the open tombs, sometimes filling them entirely.
The water carried dissolved salts from the desert floor. As the floodwater seeped into the limestone walls of the tombs and then slowly evaporated, the salts crystallised behind the painted plaster, expanding as they hardened and forcing the plaster away from the rock face. The damage is invisible at first. The paint looks intact. Then a layer of plaster the size of a hand simply falls off the wall, taking the painting with it. The process accelerates as the tomb is exposed to humidity from visitors’ breath. By the 1970s, conservation surveyors had concluded that Nefertari’s tomb was actively disintegrating and would lose most of its surviving paintings within a generation if nothing was done.
The salt damage in the Valley of the Queens was, and remains, the central conservation problem for Egyptian tomb painting. It cannot be reversed. It can only be slowed.
The Getty Restoration and the Queens Tomb That Was Saved Twice
The 1986–1992 Joint Project Between the Getty Conservation Institute and the Egyptian Antiquities Organization
In 1986, the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles and the Egyptian Antiquities Organization signed an agreement to undertake a six-year emergency conservation of Nefertari’s tomb. It was the largest and most expensive conservation project undertaken on a single Egyptian monument in the 20th century. The team was international — Italian, Egyptian, American, and French conservators worked together in shifts inside the tomb for most of the project’s duration. The total cost has never been publicly disclosed but was estimated by the Getty itself at several million dollars.
The work was systematic. The team began by photographing every square centimetre of the tomb’s surface, in normal light, in ultraviolet, in raking light to reveal surface deformation, and in infrared to reveal underdrawing. They mapped the salt damage zone by zone. They tested cleaning solvents on small unobtrusive areas. They built scaffolding inside the chambers that touched the walls in only a handful of points, distributing the load through the floor. They worked in shifts of four hours each, because the heat and humidity inside the tomb made longer shifts impossible without damage to the paintings from human breath.
The painted surface itself was almost never touched. The team’s principle was that any intervention should be minimal and reversible. Loose flakes of plaster were reattached with a calcium-hydroxide adhesive that mimicked the chemistry of the original Egyptian gypsum and could be removed by a future conservator if needed. Salt deposits were extracted by applying poultices of distilled water and paper pulp, drawing the salt out into the pulp, which was then removed. Cracks were stabilised. The floors were rebuilt to prevent further moisture migration.
The Science of Removing Salt Without Removing Paint
The technical challenge that defined the project was the salt itself. Egyptian tomb paintings were applied to a gypsum plaster ground using mineral pigments bound with a thin organic medium, probably gum arabic. The whole surface, after 3,000 years, is fragile. Modern conservation practice would normally clean such a surface with carefully chosen aqueous solutions. But water — any water — would dissolve more salt from the underlying limestone and bring it forward into the painted layer, accelerating the damage the conservators were trying to reverse.
The Getty team developed a poultice technique that drew salt out of the plaster without introducing additional water. The poultices were applied for hours or sometimes days, then peeled away with the salt crystallised into the paper fibres. The process was repeated, in some areas, dozens of times. The cumulative effect was to reduce the salt content of the plaster from a level at which it actively destroyed paintings to a level at which it remained more or less stable. The technique was developed during the project and has since been applied to other Egyptian sites, but Nefertari’s tomb was the first major test.
The tomb reopened in 1992 in a condition closer to its 13th-century BCE original than it had been in three thousand years. The paintings were, in colour and detail, what Schiaparelli had seen in 1904, with most of the post-discovery deterioration reversed.
The Strict Visitor Limits That Now Govern the Tomb
The reopening was conditional. The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, advised by the Getty team, imposed strict access limits to prevent the same humidity damage from recurring. The tomb was closed entirely for much of the 1990s. From 2003 it was opened on a restricted basis — a maximum of 150 visitors per day, in groups of no more than ten at a time, for visits of no more than ten minutes each. A premium entry fee, currently around US$70, is required on top of the general Valley of the Queens admission. The fee funds ongoing monitoring and conservation.
In practice, the limits are enforced strictly. Photographs without flash were permitted from 2016 onwards. Touching the walls is forbidden and watched by guards inside the chambers. The atmosphere inside the tomb is monitored continuously for humidity, temperature, and carbon dioxide. The system is not perfect — humidity spikes during the high tourist seasons are routinely recorded — but it has slowed the deterioration to a manageable rate. The Getty has returned periodically for follow-up surveys. The most recent, in 2018, found the paintings stable.
The conservation of QV66 is not finished and will never be finished. It is now a managed condition, like the maintenance of an ageing patient. The tomb is monitored, treated, and protected indefinitely. The alternative is to lose it.
The Atlas Entry: Visiting the Valley of the Queens Today
The Valley of the Queens is part of the Theban Necropolis on the west bank of the Nile opposite modern Luxor, approximately 670 kilometres south of Cairo by road or domestic flight. The standard route is to fly to Luxor International, take a taxi or hire a driver across the Nile, and reach the west bank ticket office in roughly thirty minutes from the airport. The valley itself is a short drive south of the more visited Valley of the Kings, and most organised tours of the necropolis include both sites in a single day.
General admission to the Valley of the Queens is inexpensive and includes entry to a rotating selection of tombs, usually three at a time from a list of roughly five currently open. The standard rotation includes one or two of the Ramesside princes’ tombs — Amun-her-khepeshef is the most consistently accessible — and a handful of less well-preserved tombs. Visitors who only buy the general ticket will not see Nefertari. The Nefertari ticket is sold separately at the entrance, currently around 1,400 Egyptian pounds (approximately US$45 to US$70 depending on the exchange rate), and is limited to a fixed daily quota that often sells out by mid-morning in peak season.
The ten-minute visit to QV66 is shorter than most people expect and longer than most people are prepared for. The chambers are small. The ceiling is low. The painted walls press in on every side, lit at low levels to protect the pigments. Visitors are expected to move quietly, stay close to the marked path, and leave when the guard indicates. Most people emerge slightly stunned. The colours are not what reproductions prepare you for. The blue is the wrong adjective. The blue is a substance.
The valley sits within easy reach of the rest of the west bank necropolis. The Valley of the Kings is two kilometres north, with its own ticket system and rotating tomb selection. The mortuary temples of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari and of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu are within fifteen minutes’ drive. The workers’ village of Deir el-Medina, where the men who painted Nefertari’s tomb lived, is between the two valleys and is open to visitors with its own ticket. A full day on the west bank, properly planned, takes in the Queens, the Kings, one of the mortuary temples, and Deir el-Medina, with the Nefertari visit reserved as the centrepiece.
The Valley of the Queens is not a comprehensive museum. It is a fragment. Ninety tombs are listed in the modern archaeological record; a small number are accessible; one is extraordinary. The fragment is what survived three millennia of theft, fire, flood, and slow decay, salvaged in the 20th century by an Italian who pushed through a sealed door and an international team who spent six years removing salt from plaster a paintbrush at a time. The Place of Beauty is partly a place and partly a memory of itself. The walls of QV66 are still painted. The queen is gone. The stars on her ceiling are still gold against dark blue, and they are still there, and they will be there for a while longer, under the conditions of strict access and constant monitoring that are now the price of looking at them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the Valley of the Queens located?
The Valley of the Queens sits on the west bank of the Nile opposite modern Luxor, approximately 670 kilometres south of Cairo, in the Theban Necropolis. It is a natural cleft in the limestone cliffs about a kilometre south of the more famous Valley of the Kings. The Egyptians called it Ta-Set-Neferu, “the Place of Beauty.” The valley runs roughly five hundred metres into the cliffs and contains the remains of over ninety rock-cut tombs from the New Kingdom period, dating between approximately 1550 and 1070 BCE.
Who was buried in the Valley of the Queens?
The valley was the burial ground for the wives, daughters, and sons of the New Kingdom pharaohs, along with a small number of other royal women and children. The most famous occupant is Nefertari, the principal wife of Ramesses II, whose tomb was discovered intact in 1904. Other notable burials include the young sons of Ramesses III — Amun-her-khepeshef, Khaemwaset, and Pareherwenemef — who died during their father’s reign. The reigning queens of greatest political importance, including Hatshepsut, were generally buried in the Valley of the Kings rather than here.
Can you visit Nefertari’s tomb (QV66)?
Yes, but access is strictly limited. The tomb is open to a maximum of 150 visitors per day in groups of no more than ten, for visits of no more than ten minutes each. A premium ticket separate from the general Valley of the Queens admission is required, currently around 1,400 Egyptian pounds (approximately US$45 to US$70). The premium tickets often sell out by mid-morning in peak season. Photography without flash has been permitted since 2016. The limits exist to control humidity and protect the paintings from further deterioration.
How did Nefertari’s tomb survive when most others were destroyed?
The tomb was robbed in antiquity within a generation or two of Nefertari’s burial around 1255 BCE, but the thieves took only the portable valuables — the mummy, the gold, the canopic jars, the funerary equipment — and left the painted walls intact, since paintings cannot be carried away. The tomb was then resealed by the ancient priesthood and apparently never reopened during the Coptic Christian period that destroyed many other tombs. It remained hidden until Ernesto Schiaparelli rediscovered it in 1904. The combination of early robbery, resealing, and obscurity preserved the paintings in unusually good condition.
What did the Getty Conservation Institute do to Nefertari’s tomb?
The Getty Conservation Institute, working with the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, conducted a major six-year conservation project on QV66 from 1986 to 1992. The team stabilised the painted plaster, which was being destroyed by salt crystallisation behind the surface, using poultices of distilled water and paper pulp to draw the salts out. Loose flakes were reattached with a calcium-hydroxide adhesive compatible with the original Egyptian gypsum. The painted surface itself was almost never touched. The project established the techniques now used across Egyptian tomb conservation.
How many tombs are in the Valley of the Queens?
Modern archaeology has identified over ninety tombs in the valley, though many are now destroyed, inaccessible, or unidentified. At any given time, a rotating selection of perhaps five tombs is open to general visitors, with Nefertari’s QV66 accessible only by separate premium ticket. The tombs of the Ramesside princes — particularly Amun-her-khepeshef’s QV55 — are usually among the open rotation and are considered the most rewarding of the standard tombs to visit. The remaining tombs are closed for conservation or because their decoration is too damaged to be worth the wear from visitors.
Sources
The Tomb of Nefertari: A Documentation Project — Getty Conservation Institute and Egyptian Antiquities Organization (1987)
Art and Eternity: The Nefertari Wall Paintings Conservation Project — Miguel Angel Corzo and Mahasti Ziai Afshar, eds. (1993)
In the Valley of the Kings and Queens — Ernesto Schiaparelli, original Italian publications 1923–1927
The Complete Valley of the Kings: Tombs and Treasures of Egypt’s Greatest Pharaohs — Nicholas Reeves and Richard H. Wilkinson (1996)
The Tomb in Ancient Egypt: Royal and Private Sepulchres from the Early Dynastic Period to the Romans — Aidan Dodson and Salima Ikram (2008)
Nefertari: Light of Egypt — Christiane Desroches Noblecourt (1999)
The Tomb Robberies of the Twentieth Egyptian Dynasty — Thomas Eric Peet (1930)
Pharaoh’s Workers: The Villagers of Deir el-Medina — Leonard H. Lesko, ed. (1994)
The Theban Necropolis: Past, Present and Future — Nigel Strudwick and John H. Taylor, eds. (2003)
Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture — Richard H. Wilkinson (1992)
Ramesses III: The Life and Times of Egypt’s Last Hero — Eric H. Cline and David O’Connor, eds. (2012)
The Coptic Encyclopedia, Volume 2: Christian Monasticism in Egypt — Aziz S. Atiya, ed. (1991)
