This is quite an old article, published in 2006, and rediscovered recently by Kat Newkirk. I missed it last year, so here it is - a mere nine months late! One traveller's experience of the tomb of Nefertari:
The tomb is softly lit. Its layout—a progression of chambers, annexes, an off-axis downward-leading corridor with both stairs and a smooth ramp (along which the sarcophagus would have been lowered)—might have been purposely disorienting, perhaps meant to evoke the "crookedness of the beyond." You are compelled to move slowly, to really look, to try to figure things out. I see clearly on the plaster the pattern of individual brushstrokes, the slightly varying pressures of hand and brush made by an artist 3,261 years ago or, more likely, earlier—work on the tomb was probably begun years before Nefertari's death, as was the custom. I can see on one wall how the painter has deftly outlined the queen's lips; how, with the tip of his instrument dipped into black pigment, he has smoothly executed a wide, inverted U to create her nostril; the way he has ever so lightly marked the indentation at the corner of her mouth, giving it, in profile, the soupçon of a smile—Leonardo da Vinci had ancient precursors. I notice how in one place he has corrected himself, a line where there shouldn't be one still visible beneath the ancient Wite-Out—a moving
record of human error committed during a single moment millennia ago (was it the
result of haste, or of inexperience?). I have never felt on such intimate terms with something so old.
See the above page for the full story.
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