Casting Metal, Tomb of Rekhmire

The metal-casting scene in the Rekhmire tomb provides the most detailed surviving representation of Egyptian bronze casting technology, showing craftsmen using foot-bellows to heat furnaces, pouring molten metal into molds, and finishing cast objects. Nina Davies's copy of this scene has been central to Egyptological discussions of New Kingdom metallurgy and is one of the most frequently reproduced images from her facsimile corpus. The scene's technical specificity — the equipment, the process sequence, the scale of the operation — makes it invaluable both as art-historical document and as evidence for the history of technology.

The metal-casting scene's complexity — multiple figures performing different stages of the casting process simultaneously — required Davies to maintain precise compositional relationships while reproducing the color conventions that distinguish the various materials: the hot glow of molten metal, the terracotta tones of the furnace, the dark forms of the craftsmen.