Word: nefertari
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...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...
...Egypt, the story is much the same. The walls of the Temple of Luxor, some 400 miles upriver from Cairo, are cracking so badly that President Hosni Mubarak, visiting the site in February, called for a thorough restoration. Nearly a fifth of the wall paintings at the tomb of Nefertari, across the Nile from Luxor in the Valley of the Queens, have been destroyed by salt deposits. In fact, says Zahi Hawass, who supervises the Giza Plateau for the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, "all the monuments are endangered. If we don't do something soon, in 100 years the paintings will...
...have little interest in preservation. A few foreign groups, however, have made major contributions. The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute has been documenting and helping to preserve the temples and tombs at Luxor since the late 1920s. And perhaps the model project is the spectacular effort to restore Nefertari's tomb. The 32-century-old mausoleum, discovered in 1904, has been officially closed since the early 1950s because of its fragile condition. Beginning in 1986, the Getty Institute, in partnership with the EAO, started the delicate, painstaking salvage of the remaining wall paintings...
...sorry state of Nefertari's tomb is typical of the condition of many of the most important monuments of Egyptian antiquity. Some of the pillars and stones of Memphis, a capital of ancient Egypt, are standing in pools of water. Reliefs carved in the sandstone walls of the temples of Luxor and Karnak are eroding, and some of the stones are stained. Chunks of plaster are falling off the walls of the temple at Abydos, an ancient religious center...
...start to act." The water penetrates the stone, dissolves the salt and in the form of a saline solution migrates back toward the surface. There the moisture evaporates, leaving behind the salts, which recrystallize, forcing apart the grains of stone. The result is a flaking and crumbling surface. In Nefertari's tomb, says Bell, "salt has just bubbled up and pushed the plaster off the walls...