Qualla: Tomb of Nefertari https://qualla.com/tomb-of-nefertari en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:34:06 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/tomb-of-nefertari-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Tomb of Nefertari https://qualla.com/tomb-of-nefertari Tomb of Nefertari: Introduction https://qualla.com/tomb-of-nefertari/ Photo credit Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, CC BY-SA 4.0. A pharaoh who fathered scores of children and outlived most of them built only one tomb that reads like a love letter. Ramesses II ruled Egypt for sixty-six years, long enough to bury sons who had grown old waiting to succeed him, yet when he wanted to praise the woman he loved most, he reached past statues and obelisks for a brush. In his writings he called Nefertari "the one for whom the sun shines." Her name meant "the most beautiful one among them." Cut into the limestone hills west of the Nile, in the Valley of the Queens, the tomb labeled QV66 holds the proof: roughly 5,200 square feet of wall paintings, glowing in red, gold, blue and green, so finely worked that visitors and scholars alike have called the chamber the Sistine Chapel of ancient Egypt.

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Image: Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/tomb-of-nefertari-wp/ssx4-tomb-of-nefertari-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Tomb of Nefertari: A Face Worth Painting https://qualla.com/tomb-of-nefertari/ Photo credit Onceinawhile, CC BY-SA 4.0. The artists who decorated QV66 lavished their best work on Nefertari herself. They shaped her eyes with care, blushed her cheeks, drew her eyebrows with deliberate elegance, and crowned her with a vulture headdress and a tall plumed cap. She appears again and again across the wal...

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Image: Onceinawhile | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/tomb-of-nefertari-wp/ssx4-tomb-of-nefertari-a-face-worth-painting.mp3 0:06 2 full Tomb of Nefertari: What the Looters Left https://qualla.com/tomb-of-nefertari/ Photo credit Onceinawhile, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the Italian archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli reached the tomb in 1904, the door stood open and the seals were gone. Robbers had emptied it, probably in antiquity. The pink granite sarcophagus survived only as scattered fragments of its lid. Of grave goods that must once ha...

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Image: Onceinawhile | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/tomb-of-nefertari-wp/ssx4-tomb-of-nefertari-what-the-looters-left.mp3 0:06 3 full Tomb of Nefertari: A Ceiling Full of Stars https://qualla.com/tomb-of-nefertari/ Photo credit Nina M. Davies, CC0. Descend the rock-cut stairs and the ceiling opens into a deep blue night scattered with golden five-pointed stars, a painted sky that follows the visitor from the antechamber down into the burial chamber itself. The walls draw on Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead, the spells mea...

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Image: Nina M. Davies | CC0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/tomb-of-nefertari-wp/ssx4-tomb-of-nefertari-a-ceiling-full-of-stars.mp3 0:06 4 full Tomb of Nefertari: Saving the Sistine Chapel of the Desert https://qualla.com/tomb-of-nefertari/ Photo credit Onceinawhile, CC BY-SA 4.0. Beauty this fragile does not survive on its own. Flood water seeping into the limestone, salt crystallizing behind the plaster, bacteria, and even the humidity of human breath had all attacked the paintings by the twentieth century. Between 1986 and 1992 the Getty Conservation In...

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Image: Onceinawhile | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/tomb-of-nefertari-wp/ssx4-tomb-of-nefertari-saving-the-sistine-chapel-of-the-desert.mp3 0:06 5 full