The Tomb of Queen Nefertari

By DEAN FISCHER LUXOR

OF THE SEVERAL QUEENS of the legendary Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II (1290-1223 B.C.), none outshone Nefertari. She was Ramses' favorite wife, and by all accounts his loveliest. For her death, Ramses commissioned a subterranean tomb in the Valley of the Queens near Thebes, where she was portrayed in lustrous wall paintings by the leading artists of the kingdom.

Nefertari's tomb, lost for three millenniums, was discovered in 1904. Its treasures had been looted, probably in antiquity, and its wall paintings had deteriorated. By 1940, in fact, the decay had become so severe that Egyptian authorities closed the tomb to the public. It seemed to have become yet another endangered landmark of ancient Egyptian civilization. But in 1986 the Egyptian Antiquities Organization and the Getty Conservation Institute of Santa Monica, Calif., embarked on a $4 million restoration project. The dramatic results were unveiled last week. Although access to the tomb will be limited for two years to scientists, scholars and visiting dignitaries while the heat and humidity of the tomb are monitored, the joint E.A.O.-Getty effort has retrieved a priceless cultural heritage and, where the paintings are concerned, one of the finest artistic achievements of the Pharaonic Age.

The work was carried out under the supervision of the Getty's director, Miguel Angel Corzo, a Spaniard. When he began six years ago, he faced a formidable task. Paint was flaking and chunks of plaster were detached from the limestone walls. Insects nested in corners. Egyptian officials had glued large squares of cloth to the walls to prevent them from collapsing and had suspended a net to catch portions of falling ceiling plaster.

Corzo's scientific experts identified the two primary causes of damage to the tomb: humidity and humanity. They theorized that the deterioration before the tomb's discovery was the result of a flood that occurred between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100. The scientists' studies also showed that the presence of 17 people inside the tomb for a mere half an hour could raise the relative humidity from 30% to 50%, more than high enough to allow bacteria to grow.

Corzo brought in a celebrated Italian husband-and-wife team of art restorers, Paolo and Laura Mora, who led six Italian and four Egyptian conservators in a year-long emergency campaign. They applied 10,000 strips of Japanese mulberry-bark paper to the walls and ceilings like Band-Aids, to keep plaster from crumbling and paint from flaking. Then began the painstaking work of restoration. The conservators swabbed every square inch of the tomb with distilled water, gently removing the accumulation of 3,000 years of dust and soot. In some areas, they chiseled the layers of plaster and paint from the wall, using the mulberry-bark strips as hinges, to clean the limestone walls of the cave and repair salt fractures.

The conservation process took four years. No retouching of the original paint was allowed; the purpose was to preserve rather than enhance. Areas where paint and plaster had disappeared were left bare. But many of the murals are remarkably intact, the colors as rich and vivid as if they had been applied yesterday.

Corzo notes that the artisans who labored in the tomb three millenniums ago left unexpected evidence of their fallibility. The rows of stars in the funerary ceiling were kept straight by strings stretched from wall to wall. In the sarcophagus chamber, conservators discovered a row of fingerprints left along a string line by a careless craftsman. In one corner, a contractor had scratched in hieroglyphics his accounting of work completed. And on one pillar, Nefertari's flesh-toned cheek is splotched with blue ceiling paint. Could it be that she died before the tomb was completed and the artisans in their haste failed to remove the blemish? Rather than a distraction from Nefertari's beauty, the imperfection serves as a bridge of human identification spanning the ages.