Egyptian Queen. Her origins are uncertain, but she is believed to have been a member of the Egyptian nobility. She and Ramses, son of Seti I, married in their teens, before his asscension to the throne as Ramses II. She was apparently not only his primary, but his favorite among his eight principal wives. Nefertari had at least four sons and two daughters with Ramses including Prince Amun-her-khepeshef, Crown Prince and Commander of the Troops; Prince Meriatum, High Priest of Heliopolis; and Princess Meritamen, Singer of Amun and Priestess of Hathor. In the art and monuments commisioned by her husband, Nefertari is depicted as being equal in size to Ramses, a rarity indicating her importance to the Pharaoh. Cuniform tablets from the Hittite city Boghazkoy, containing Nefertari's correspondence with the king Hattusilis and his wife Pudukhepra, indicated she was apparently instrumental in maintaining peace between Egyptians and Hittites, eventually arranging Ramesses' marriage to a Hittite princess. Nefertari carried the titles "the Great Royal Wife," "the Lady of Two Lands," "the Mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt," and God’s Wife of Amun, which gave her considerable wealth and power independent of the pharaoh. Ramses dedicated a joint temple to Nefertari and the goddess Hathor at Abu-Simbel making her perhaps the only Egyptian queen to be deified in her lifetime. By 1240s BC Nefertri’s everpresence in Ramses’ life appeared to wane. Current scholarship puts her death sometime around the twenty-fith year of Ramses’ reign to be succeeded by Isetnofret as Pharaoh’s principal wife. Ramses had a tomb for Nefertari cut into the Valley of the Queens. The tomb was discovered by archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli in 1904. Nefertari’s mummy and most of the treasures entombed with her had been destroyed or removed by ancient tomb robbers, only fragments of the queen's pink granite sarcophagus and mummy were found in the burial chamber, and they were taken to the Egyptian Museum in Turin. The paintings found within the tomb, however, were the best preserved and most detailed source of ancient Egyptian thought on mortality and immortality. The tomb paintings featured extracts from the Book of the Dead which told of all the ceremonies and tests taking place from the death of Nefertari up until the end of her journey when Nefertari is reborn. Poetry written by Ramses to his wife was inscribed on the walls of her burial chamber: "My love is unique - no one can rival her, for she is the most beautiful woman alive. Just by passing, she has stolen away my heart." The tomb, now known as QV66, is regarded as the most beautiful of the tombs in the valley. In a massive undertaking, restoration of the tomb paintings began in 1988 and was completed in 1992. Egyptian authorities then decided to close the tomb to the public in order to preserve the delicate art work. Her name is sometimes spelled Nofretari or Nefertari Meri-en-Mut. Her name means "the most beautiful.”