Professional Peefer

snnsastark:

BADASS WOMEN OF THE ANCIENT WORLD: NEFERTARI (? – CA 1255 BC)

Virtually nothing is known about Nefertari’s life before she married Ramesses (although she was probably from a noble family, possibly related to the old Pharaoh Ay of the Eighteenth Dynasty), but as his Chief Wife she became one of the most famous women in Egyptian history.

Ramesses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt, known as Ramesses the Great, is widely regarded as one of the most successful pharaohs, famous for both his military and diplomatic feats. Accordingly, Nefertari is remembered as the perfect royal consort, someone who helped Ramesses to keep and expand his empire. She was his most important and favorite wife.

Highly educated in a time where this wasn’t the norm even among the privileged, Nefertari was fluent in many languages and able to read and write hieroglyphics. These skills she used especially in the realm of diplomacy, exchanging letters and gifts with consorts around the Mediterranean, just as her husband did with the great rulers of their time. Her status as a woman made it possible for Nefertari to practice diplomacy in a more informal way. Nefertari probably also 

accompanied her husband on his military campaigns.

She appears in monuments both inside Egypt and in Egyptian provinces, but it’s in the latter than she truly shines, especially in the twin temples of Abu Simbel, in Nubia. A complex with two temples, the smaller one is dedicated to the goddess Hathor, personified by Nefertari, the second time an Egyptian temple was dedicated to a pharaoh’s wife, and a rare example of the king and his consort being portrayed in equal size.

Nefertari spent more than twenty years on the throne and had at least six children with Ramesses, but none of her sons outlived their father (her daughters, however, played more active roles in the court life). It seems that their marriage was a love match: not only Ramesses built for her a spetacular tomb (one of the largest and most richly decorated in the Valley of Queens) but also filled it with poetry, such as the verse “Just by passing, she has stolen away my heart”. Ramesses called Nefertari “the one for whom the sun shines”.