Cretans Bringing Gifts, Tomb of Rekhmire

The Rekhmire tomb's scenes of foreign tribute are among the most important documents of New Kingdom international relations, and the Cretan gift-bearers — identifiable by their distinctive dress, hairstyles, and the objects they carry — provide visual evidence of the exchange networks connecting Minoan/Mycenaean Aegean culture with Egypt at the height of the New Kingdom empire. Nina Davies's copies of these scenes were central to the mid-twentieth-century scholarly discussion of Aegean-Egyptian connections, providing clearly legible reproductions of fragile originals. The specific identification of the bearers as 'Keftiu' — the Egyptian name for the Cretans — was hotly debated in the scholarship of this period.

The Cretan tribute-bearers posed particular challenges for Davies's facsimile technique because their distinctive Aegean dress and objects required her to preserve visual information crucial to their ethnic identification — the specific patterns of their garments, the forms of the metal vessels they carry, the details of their hairstyles.