Military Musicians Showing Nubian and Egyptian Styles

This copy documents military musician scenes from a Theban tomb that depict both Nubian and Egyptian performers side by side — visual evidence of the ethnic diversity of New Kingdom Egypt's military apparatus and cultural life. Nina Davies's documentation of such scenes preserved crucial iconographic evidence about musical instruments, dress, and the representation of ethnic difference in ancient Egyptian court art. The Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian expedition, which employed both Norman and Nina Davies, was one of the most systematic efforts to document and preserve the visual record of the Theban tombs before irreversible deterioration.

Davies's facsimile technique requires her to capture not only the image but the condition of the original — the gaps, the color variations from differential preservation, the specific quality of mineral pigments on plastered limestone. Her watercolor rendering translates these conditions with scholarly accuracy.