Chapter
6: Grief and the Golden Age
The death of
Nefertari left a wound upon the reign of Ramses II that never fully healed.
Though he would live for decades more, though he would take other wives and
father scores of additional children, something shifted in the great pharaoh
after his queen was laid to rest in her magnificent tomb. The public monuments
continued to rise. The military campaigns continued to secure Egypt's borders.
But in the art, in the inscriptions, in the subtle details that historians have
learned to read like a language of the soul, the absence of Nefertari is
written in stone.
Ramses II
had taken other wives before Nefertari's death. This was not a betrayal but a
necessity of kingship. The pharaoh was expected to produce heirs, many heirs,
to secure the succession and demonstrate the vitality of the royal line.
Isetnofret, another queen of significant status, had borne Ramses several
children, including Khaemwaset, the learned priest-king who would become famous
as a scholar and restorer of ancient monuments. There were others: minor wives,
concubines, and eventually, as was customary in the 18th and 19th dynasties,
daughters of the king himself who bore children to their father to preserve the
royal blood.
But none of
these women ever held the position Nefertari had occupied. Her titles were not
passed on. No successor was ever designated "Great Royal Wife" with
the same accumulation of honors. In the art of the later years of his reign,
when Ramses was depicted with queens at his side, they appeared in the
traditional manner—diminutive figures standing at knee-height, their faces
generic, their identities interchangeable. The revolutionary equality of Abu
Simbel was never repeated.
The change
is visible across the monuments of Egypt. At the great temple of Luxor, where
Nefertari had once been shown leading royal processions with the authority of a
co-regent, later reliefs show other queens in subordinate roles. At Karnak,
where Nefertari's cartouche had appeared beside Ramses' on the great stelae
celebrating his victories, the inscriptions of later years mention no queen by
name. The pattern is unmistakable: after Nefertari, no woman shared Ramses'
throne.
What did
this mean for the king himself? The records are silent on his private grief.
Egyptian royal inscriptions were not given to emotional confession; they
recorded deeds, titles, and divine favor. But there are clues. The love poetry
attributed to Ramses ceases abruptly after the period of Nefertari's death. No
verses survive from the later decades of his reign celebrating any other queen.
The tender inscriptions that once called Nefertari "the one for whom the
sun shines" are replaced by formulaic praises of the gods and the king's
own achievements.
Ramses
turned, perhaps, to the work that had always defined him. He built with a fury
that astonished even his own court. The great hypostyle hall at Karnak, a
forest of 134 massive columns, was completed during this period. The Ramesseum,
his mortuary temple on the west bank of Thebes, rose to monumental proportions.
Cities were founded. Temples were expanded. Statues were carved by the
hundreds. It was as if the king sought to fill the void left by Nefertari's
absence with stone.
Yet even in
the midst of this building frenzy, he never forgot her. At Abu Simbel, the
temple he had built for her continued to receive offerings. In the Valley of
the Queens, her tomb was maintained, its entrance watched over by priests who
performed the daily rituals that sustained her in the afterlife. When Ramses
commissioned his own tomb in the Valley of the Kings, he included scenes that
depicted his eventual reunion with Nefertari in the underworld. In the sacred
texts that would guide his own journey through the afterlife, her name was
inscribed among those he wished to meet again.
The years
rolled on. Ramses outlived many of his children, including several sons who had
been designated as heirs. He watched the generations unfold beneath him, a
patriarch of such longevity that he became a living legend. By the time he
reached his ninetieth year, he had ruled Egypt for sixty-six years—one of the
longest reigns in human history. He had seen empires rise and fall. He had
signed the first peace treaty known to history. He had built more monuments
than any pharaoh before or after him.
But the
heart that had once declared "my love is unique" beat now in the
chest of an old man who had outlived almost everyone he had ever loved.
When Ramses
II finally died in 1213 BCE, he was buried with all the splendor due the
greatest of pharaohs. His tomb in the Valley of the Kings, though looted in
antiquity, once contained treasures beyond imagining. His body was mummified
with exquisite care, his face covered by a golden mask that still astonishes
those who see it in Cairo's Egyptian Museum. He was, as he had always intended,
immortal.
Yet even in
death, he did not forget his queen. The funerary texts inscribed in his tomb
make provision for their reunion. The spells that would guide him through the
underworld include words that would allow him to find her among the souls of
the blessed dead. In the Field of Reeds, the Egyptian paradise where the
faithful dwelt in eternal peace, Ramses would once again walk beside his
Beautiful Companion.
The ancient
Egyptians believed that death was not an end but a transition. The soul, they
taught, could be reunited with those it loved in the afterlife, provided the
proper rituals were performed and the name of the beloved was not forgotten.
Ramses had ensured that Nefertari's name would never be forgotten. He had
carved it into mountains, inscribed it on temples, and buried it in the deepest
chambers of his own heart.
In his final
years, perhaps as he gazed out across the Nile from the palace at Pi-Ramses,
the old king remembered a woman who had passed by him once and stolen his
heart. He remembered the sound of her voice, sweet like honey. He remembered
the way the sun seemed to shine for her alone. And he knew, with the certainty
that had guided him through sixty-six years of rule, that he would see her
again.
The sun set
on Ramses II for the last time. But in the Valley of the Queens, beneath a
ceiling of painted stars, Nefertari waited. And somewhere between the world of
the living and the Field of Reeds, the Eternal Couple began their journey home.
👑 Ramses II and Nefertari: The Eternal Couple"
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