Tomb Being Restored : Queen of Egypt to Get Face Lift Centuries Late

After 3,200 years, she still looks beautiful. Her shapely figure, delicate features and long black hair, depicted on the walls of her tomb in colors as fresh as if they had been painted yesterday, provide ample evidence of how she came to personify the elegance and sophistication of ancient Egypt.

But time has not been all that kind to Queen Nefertari, favorite wife of the warrior Pharaoh Ramses II and “Beautiful of Face,” “Lady of Charm” and “Mistress of the Two Lands,” to cite but a few of her royal titles.

Surface Is Marred

Here and there on the walls, her gown is discolored and her features cracked or obliterated, as are those of the gods and attendants surrounding her. In about half of the tomb, the plaster has come loose from the walls or fallen off altogether. In other places, the surface is marred and pitted by the corrosive effects of ancient insect nests and deposits of salt embedded in the limestone walls.

Indeed, so precarious is the condition of Nefertari’s tomb that it has been closed to the public since shortly after its discovery in 1904 by the Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli.

Ever since the Egyptian authorities first began contemplating restoration of the tomb after World War II, they have fretted over the best approach. The tomb, despite the extensive damage, is still one of the best surviving examples of New Kingdom period artwork--a cultural and artistic monument comparable, in the words of Dr. Ahmed Kadry, chairman of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, to “the Sistine Chapel and the Taj Mahal.”

The project kept being postponed, however, because of the complex nature of the problems afflicting the tomb, doubts about the origin of the salt crystals that account for most of the damage, and the expensive and esoteric nature of some of the previous restoration proposals.

“Numerous scientific missions have long frequented the tomb of Nefertari,” noted Feisal Esmael, a scientific adviser to the Antiquities Organization. “They succeeded only in creating tidal waves of alternating hope and despair.”

Now, after a yearlong study, an international team of scientists and restorers assembled by the Getty Conservation Institute of Marina del Rey, Calif., thinks it has found a way of nursing Nefertari back to health.

The team has just completed an intensive three-month conservation effort to protect the most badly damaged areas of the tomb and, starting in the fall, if its proposals are approved by the Egyptian government, the scientists will begin work on a longer-term project to fully restore and preserve the tomb.

“After 40 years of doubts, 40 years of worries, 40 years of unchecked deterioration,” Kadry said, “we are finally in a position to say that Nefertari is on her way to being saved.”

A Harsh Land

The road to the Valley of the Queens cuts through a wild and tortured land of sunbaked limestone, huge piles of rock debris cascading down the slopes like frozen waterfalls and craggy, saw-toothed cliffs imbued with a desolate majesty.

Here, on the eastern fringe of the Libyan Desert, the Nile swerves sharply, like a backward “C,” as though the river itself were trying to escape the harsh features of its surroundings. Seen from the perspective of an airplane landing at nearby Luxor--in ancient times the Egyptian capital of Thebes--the land appears lifeless, the only sign of life being the few narrow roads that wind through the desert like varicose veins.

It was here in the Valley of the Queens and the nearby Valley of the Kings, more than 3,000 years ago, that the men and women who ruled what was then one of the greatest civilizations on Earth chose to spend eternity.

Threat From Salt Deposits

From the geological point of view, however, it was, in the words of Miguel Angel Corzo, project coordinator for the Getty Institute, “a lousy place to build a tomb.”

The limestone cliffs into which the tombs were hewn contain large amounts of salt deposits, and the fractured, fissured geology of the region helped to trap water from ancient rainfall, which, according to one theory, mobilized the salts whose crystallization now threatens a number of the tombs in the area.

In Nefertari’s tomb, the salt crystals have pushed their way through the rock, dislodging the painted plaster from the walls. The salt crystals have already destroyed about 20% of the 5,200-square-foot tomb and have seriously damaged another 30%, where the painted surface is pitted and the plaster has buckled.

To keep this plaster from falling off before the permanent restoration work is completed, a team of restorers led by Prof. Paolo Mora, former chief conservator of Italy’s Central Restoration Institute, spent more than 1,000 man-hours applying more than 12,000 Band-Aid-sized strips of gauze and Japanese mulberry bark paper over the cracks and bulges in the walls.

Cost More Than $1 Million

Officials from the Getty Institute and the Egyptian Antiquities Organization will now begin analyzing the data collected over the last year by a team of scientists from four continents before commencing the final phase of the restoration work, which is expected to take between two and three years and cost in excess of $1 million, according to preliminary estimates.

Although numerous studies and proposals to restore the tomb have been made--and several ill-advised attempts at restoration have failed--Kadry and other officials are optimistic that the current effort will succeed because of the extraordinary amount of science, drawn from several disciplines, that has so far been invested in the project.

The tomb has been studied by geologists, biologists, microbiologists, chemists, Egyptologists and restoration experts. It has been photographed from the inside, the outside and even from space--courtesy of the facilities of the U.S. Landsat 5 satellite.

Revised Theories

In the process, theories as to the source of the water that activated the salt crystallization responsible for most of the damage have been revised.

The original theory held that runoff rainwater percolating through rock fissures was to blame, a depressing hypothesis because it meant that damage to the tomb could occur again and again after every rainfall, however rare.

“We were under this idea that water seeping through the rocks released the salts, and we were all very despondent because we thought this was going to happen over and over again and there would be nothing we could do about it,” said Omar El Arini, an Egyptian scientist who works as a consultant for the U.S. National Science Foundation.

This belief spawned some exotic and impractical restoration proposals in the past, including one from a Swedish mission that suggested literally sawing Nefertari’s tomb away from the surrounding hillside and encasing it in sheets of stainless steel.

Yearlong Effort

“Proposals like these,” Arini said, “are really scary.”

As a result, nothing much was done until Dr. Frank Preusser, director of the Getty Institute’s Scientific Research Department, came to Egypt on a trip to scout out possible restoration projects for the institute’s multidisciplinary approach.

At the time, the choice of Nefertari’s tomb seemed a bit like an archeological version of “Mission Impossible.” But the yearlong research effort, the most exhaustive ever done on the tomb, has given scientists new hope that the damage can be undone.

For one thing, a detailed comparison of the condition of the tomb as it exists today with the photographs taken of it by Schiaparelli’s mission in 1904 suggests that, apart from some additional man-made damage, there has been no further harm to the tomb as a result of salt crystallization.

‘Seeds of Destruction’

This, along with the results of other observations, has led to a new theory that the salts in the limestone were originally released by the water contained in the plaster and the paint used by the ancient Egyptians when they made the tomb.

“We now think,” Corzo said, “that the plaster may have contained the seeds of its own destruction.”

Arini, who helped to formulate this theory, said its importance lies in “directing the conservators to pay most of their attention to conservation methods inside the tomb, rather than outside of it.”

This in turn may mean limiting the number of people who can visit the tomb at any given time so as to keep the level of humidity inside from rising above certain levels, he said. One of the aims of the Getty team’s research is to establish a “microclimatic model” to determine the conditions that must be maintained in the tomb and the restrictions on access that may be necessary to maintain them, he said.

‘Part of Heritage’

However, Kadry hopes that once the restoration is complete, the tomb can at least be opened to limited public viewing.

“Nefertari’s tomb,” he said, “is one of the most important monuments in history. . . . It is a great contribution, a part of our cultural heritage that should be seen.”

Luis Monreal, director of the Getty Institute, said: “This is a standard-setting project. The problems in Nefertari’s tomb are typical of many of the problems afflicting other tombs of the New Kingdom period.”

If Nefertari’s tomb can be successfully restored, he said, then a way will have been found to “save a significant percentage of Egypt’s heritage.”

Gaballa Ali Gaballa, vice dean of archeology at Cairo University, offers yet another reason why the restoration of Nefertari’s tomb is important to Egyptians:

“There is an Arab proverb about a mother who is asked which of her children are dearest to her. The mother replies: ‘The youngest until he grows old; the absent until he comes home, and the sick until he’s well.’ Nefertari is sick, and so she is dear to our hearts.”