Nefertari was born around 1300 BCE, probably at Thebes, into a family of sufficient status to secure her a place in the harem of the crown prince Ramesses, the son of Seti I and the grandson of Ramesses I, the founder of the Nineteenth Dynasty. Her full name was Nefertari Merytmut: Nefertari meant "the Most Beautiful of Them All," and Merytmut meant "Beloved of Mut," the vulture goddess of Thebes who was the consort of Amun, the king of the gods. Whether she was of royal blood or merely noble birth remains uncertain, but her titles suggest she was not a king's daughter, which makes her elevation to Great Royal Wife all the more remarkable. In the normal course of Egyptian kingship, the Great Royal Wife was a princess of the blood, a sister or daughter of the pharaoh, chosen to keep the royal line pure. Nefertari was different. She was chosen for love.

She married Ramesses before he ascended the throne, while he was still the crown prince and military commander under his father Seti I. By the time Ramesses II became pharaoh in 1279 BCE, Nefertari was already his principal queen, and she bore him at least one daughter, Merytamun, who would later succeed her as Great Royal Wife. The exact number of her children is uncertain - Ramesses II fathered more than a hundred sons and daughters by various wives and concubines, and distinguishing Nefertari's offspring from the others is difficult - but Merytamun is certain, and she may also have been the mother of other princesses including Henuttaui and Baketmut, whose tombs in the Valley of the Queens suggest a connection to the Great Royal Wife.

The defining monument of Nefertari's life is the Small Temple at Abu Simbel, the southernmost temple complex in Egypt, carved into the cliffs of Nubia near the Second Cataract of the Nile. Ramesses II built two temples at Abu Simbel: the Great Temple, dedicated to himself and the gods Amun, Ra-Horakhty, and Ptah, with its four colossal seated statues of the pharaoh; and the Small Temple, dedicated to Nefertari and the goddess Hathor, the cow goddess of motherhood, music, and joy. The Small Temple is unique in Egyptian architecture: it is the only temple built by a pharaoh primarily for his queen, and the only one where the queen appears at the same scale as the king. Six colossal statues stand at the facade: four of Ramesses II and two of Nefertari, each approximately ten metres tall, and all are carved with the same idealised features and the same divine proportions. The message was unmistakable: in the eyes of Egypt's greatest builder, his queen was his equal. Inside, the sanctuary depicts Nefertari in the act of worshipping Hathor, who is shown as a cow emerging from the papyrus marshes, and the walls bear inscriptions in which Ramesses declares his love: "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 temple was constructed around the twenty-fourth year of Ramesses II's reign and took approximately ten years to complete, which means Nefertari was still alive when the work began but may have died before it was finished.

Her death came around 1255 BCE, in the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year of Ramesses II's reign, when she was between forty and fifty years old. The cause is unknown, but the scientific analysis of her mummified legs suggests she was a tall woman, approximately one hundred and sixty-five centimetres, which was above average for Egyptian women of her time and equal to the height of many men. She was buried in tomb QV66 in the Valley of the Queens, a tomb of extraordinary beauty and complexity that Schiaparelli discovered in 1904 after the entrance had been buried by debris and forgotten for millennia.

The tomb is a masterpiece of New Kingdom art. Its walls are covered with painted scenes from the Book of the Dead, the collection of spells that guided the deceased through the underworld, and from the Book of Gates, the text that described the twelve hours of the night through which the sun god Re travelled before his rebirth at dawn. Nefertari appears in every scene: playing senet, the board game that represented the journey of the soul; being led by the hand by Horus, the falcon-headed sky god, through the gates of the underworld; kneeling before Osiris, the green-skinned lord of the dead who judged every heart against the feather of maat, the goddess of truth; and finally entering the Field of Reeds, the paradise where the justified dead lived in eternal plenty. The paintings are executed in a style of exceptional refinement, with delicate brushwork, subtle shading, and a palette of red, blue, yellow, and green that has been called the most beautiful in Egyptian art. The queen's face is rendered with particular care: her eyes are large and almond-shaped, her cheeks bear a hint of blush, and her eyebrows are arched in the classic Egyptian manner. Every surface is decorated, from the entrance hall to the burial chamber, and the effect is overwhelming: a three-thousand-year-old vision of the afterlife that still has the power to move visitors to tears.

The tomb had been robbed in antiquity, probably within a few centuries of Nefertari's burial. The stone sarcophagus was smashed, the gilded wooden coffins were pulled out and broken, and the mummy was ripped into pieces. The robbers took the gold, the jewellery, and the precious objects, leaving behind only the heavy stone, the broken wood, and the fragments of a body that had once been the most beautiful woman in Egypt. When Schiaparelli entered the tomb in 1904, he found a pair of mummified legs, three fragments of tibia and femur, lying in the debris. He also found a pair of sandals, thirty-four wooden shabtis - small servant statues that performed labour for the dead in the afterlife - bearing Nefertari's name, fragments of furniture, and broken pottery. The legs were taken to the Egyptian Museum in Turin, where they remained for more than a century, assumed to be Nefertari's but never scientifically tested.

In 2016, a multidisciplinary team led by the University of Zurich conducted the first comprehensive scientific investigation of the remains. Radiocarbon dating placed them in the New Kingdom, though slightly older than expected, a discrepancy possibly caused by older embalming materials. Anthropometric analysis confirmed the legs belonged to a female, approximately forty to fifty years old at death, with a stature of approximately one hundred and sixty-five centimetres, taller than eighty-four percent of Egyptian women of her time. The embalming materials were consistent with Ramesside royal mummification practices, and the foot size matched the sandals found in the tomb. Of sixteen criteria tested, fourteen fitted the identification as Nefertari, two were inconclusive, and none contradicted it. The queen had been found.

Nefertari's political role extended far beyond her beauty. She was one of the few Egyptian queens who conducted independent foreign diplomacy. After the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE, the greatest military confrontation of Ramesses II's reign, Egypt and the Hittite Empire spent years negotiating a peace treaty that was finally signed around 1259 BCE, one of the first recorded international treaties in history. The treaty was inscribed on temple walls at Karnak and on silver tablets exchanged between the two courts, but the negotiations were not conducted solely by the kings. Nefertari corresponded directly with Puduhepa, the queen of Hattusili III of Hatti, in letters written in cuneiform script on clay tablets discovered at Hattusa, the Hittite capital in modern Turkey. In the letters, Nefertari addresses Puduhepa as "my sister," the conventional language of diplomatic parity between royal women, and discusses the good peace and good brotherhood between the two kingdoms. She sends gifts: a multicoloured gold necklace of twelve strands weighing eighty-eight shekels, a colourful cloak of royal fabric, a colourful tunic of royal fabric, and ten additional garments of excellent quality. The correspondence proves that Nefertari was not merely a decorative consort but an active participant in the diplomacy of empire, a queen who wielded pen and gold with equal skill.

At Karnak and Luxor, Nefertari appears alongside Ramesses II in temple reliefs, a visual honour granted to very few queens. At the temple of Ptah in Memphis, she is depicted on a limestone colossus of the pharaoh, her titles inscribed as "Hereditary Princess," "The Greatly Praised One," and "Great Royal Wife." These titles, normally reserved for daughters of the king, suggest that Ramesses II elevated her to a status beyond her birth, making her the equal of a princess in the official record. She also appears in a statue group from Deir el-Bahri and on stelae from Deir el-Medina, the village of the royal tomb builders, proof that her image was distributed throughout the kingdom as a symbol of the queen's power.