Nefertari

Of the consorts of the New Kingdom, Nefertari (d. c. 1255 BC) is the one whose surroundings can still be experienced most vividly, through the painted tomb and rock-cut temple her husband provided. Her origins are unrecorded; she held no titles naming a royal father, and the suggestion that her family was connected to the late 18th Dynasty — even to the king Ay, prompted by an object found in her tomb — remains speculation. She married Ramesses II before his accession around 1279 BC and was his Great Royal Wife from the start of the reign, bearing several sons, including the eldest, Amunherkhepeshef, and several daughters, though none of her children ultimately succeeded.

Her prominence exceeded the ceremonial. She appears beside the king at major state occasions early in the reign, and when peace was concluded with the Hittites in 1259 BC she exchanged letters and gifts with the Hittite queen Puduhepa, greeting her as a "sister" — direct queen-to-queen diplomacy of a kind rarely documented.

The most conspicuous mark of her standing is at Abu Simbel, where the smaller of the two rock temples was dedicated jointly to the goddess Hathor and to Nefertari herself. On its facade her colossal statues stand equal in height to those of Ramesses, an equivalence almost without parallel for an Egyptian queen; an accompanying text calls her "she for whose sake the very sun does shine." She appears to have attended the temples' dedication around the king's twenty-fourth year, after which she fades from the record — possibly already ailing — and her death is conventionally placed around 1255 BC.

She was buried in the Valley of the Queens in QV66, discovered by Ernesto Schiaparelli's Italian expedition in 1904. The tomb had been robbed and her mummy largely lost, but its wall paintings, showing the queen led through the underworld by the gods, are commonly judged the finest in the Theban necropolis; extensive conservation in the late twentieth century stabilized them. Ramesses II outlived her by more than four decades.