No surviving text explains the choice, and Egyptologists are left to read the landscape itself. The valley sits close to Deir el-Medina, the walled village of the artisans who cut and decorated the royal tombs - the same skilled hands worked both sides of the ridge. It lies a short distance from the Valley of the Kings, keeping the dead of one family within reach of each other. And at the valley's entrance, a sacred grotto dedicated to the goddess Hathor may have made the ground holy. Hathor was a goddess of the western mountain and the welcoming of the dead, and her grotto was likely tied to ideas of rejuvenation - the hope that those buried here would be reborn. For a people who built their whole civilization around the journey past death, a valley watched over by Hathor was no accident.

The valley's masterpiece belongs to Nefertari, the beloved great wife of Ramesses II, the pharaoh who ruled for sixty-six years and called himself the Great. Her tomb, designated QV66, was found in 1904 by the Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli, who held the excavation rights here and worked the site methodically with his collaborator Francesco Ballerini. Robbers had long since stripped the burial of its treasure. But what they could not carry off were the walls. Across roughly 520 square meters of plaster, Nefertari is shown moving through the afterlife - playing the board game senet, greeted by gods, her gown white and translucent, the ceiling a field of golden stars on deep blue. The colors are so vivid and the drawing so assured that the tomb is often called the Sistine Chapel of ancient Egypt.

Beauty this fragile does not survive on its own. The valley is cut into a treacherous mix of limestone, clay, and shale, faulted and tilted over millions of years. The clays swell and shrink with every rare flash flood, cracking tomb walls; groundwater seeps in and leaves crystallized salt that pushes paint off plaster from behind. By the twentieth century, Nefertari's reliefs were in danger of being lost entirely. Between 1986 and 1992, the Getty Conservation Institute worked with Egyptian authorities to stabilize them - drawing out salts, consolidating the plaster, monitoring the air. The tomb reopened in 1995 under tight limits on how many visitors may enter and for how long. A few tombs here have been left to a different kind of guest: bat colonies now roost in QV15, QV48, and QV78, protected for their ecological value.

Not everyone in the royal family came to rest here. During the Eighteenth Dynasty, the valley took nobles and officials alongside royals - a head of the stables, a vizier, an early princess named Ahmose. By the Nineteenth Dynasty, under Ramesses I, Seti I, and Ramesses II, it narrowed to royal women almost exclusively. The princes went elsewhere. Across the hills in the Valley of the Kings lies KV5, a sprawling warren rediscovered to be the tomb of the sons of Ramesses II - dozens of chambers for the king's many boys. Read together, the two valleys map a dynasty's sense of where its people belonged in death: the kings in one wadi, their wives in another, their sons in a third, all within a few minutes' walk under the same desert sun.