Menna's Daughter Offering to her Parents, Tomb of Menna

The Tomb of Menna (TT 69) at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna contains some of the finest agricultural and funerary scenes of the Theban necropolis, and this scene of Menna's daughter making offerings to her parents at their funerary feast belongs to the tomb's program of afterlife provisioning. Nina Davies's copy of this scene preserves the delicate linear draftsmanship and subtle color of the original, which was already showing signs of damage when she worked there in the early twentieth century. The scene's domestic intimacy — a daughter's filial devotion expressed as eternal ritual — was characteristic of the New Kingdom private tomb's vision of ongoing family life in the hereafter.

Davies translates the tomb painting's precise linear boundaries and flat color fields into watercolor with careful attention to the original's color values — the warm yellows and ochres of skin, the varied pigments of clothing and offering objects — preserving the visual information of the specific pigment choice as well as the compositional arrangement.