Davies Norman de Garris. Paintings from the tomb of Rekh-mi-Rēʼ at Thebes

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1935. — 122 p. — (Publications of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Egyptian Expedition 10).This volume contains reproductions in color from the tomb of Rekh-mi-Re (no. 100 in the Theban series). Key plates to the best-preserved walls of the tomb (pis. XXII-XXVI), which will enable the reader to place the scenes of the color plates in their proper setting, are also included. The scale of plate XXII is 1 :11, that of plates XXIII to XXVI about 1:22. We expect to publish all the surviving scenes and inscriptions of the tomb with full descriptive text in a work of two quarto volumes, now in preparation, to be entitled "The Tomb of Rekh-mi-Rēʼ at Thebes."
It has been possible to make many restorations of injured portions of the paintings in this tomb. In the key plates no distinction has been made between restored and surviving details, in order that the reader may appreciate better the original appearance of the walls. Plate XXV has been renovated to a special degree, as all the many figures of Rekh-mi-Rēʼ and of the sem-priest when wearing the leopard's skin had been more or less completely painted out by personal enemies or excised by the monotheistic heretics after them. All restored parts are indicated in broken line in the plates of the forthcoming publication of the tomb. Rekh-mi-Rēʼ was vizier during the last twenty years of the reign of Thut-mose III and for a short part of the reign of that king's son and successor, Amen-hotpe II, that is to say from about 1470 to 1445 B. c. At this advanced stage of Egyptian history the pictures in a tomb of any pretensions had ceased to be a mere enumeration of the objects the deceased owned, the food he loved to eat, the persons who formed his household, together with simple presentations of his habitual mode of life and occupations—all designed with a view to their continuation after death, either within the tomb or in some vaguer sphere. To this every age had added a depiction of the proper burial ceremonial as a primary condition of entry on a full and happy future life. All these features were retained to the latest days of Egyptian tomb decoration, but the principle that these scenes formed a model for the future life gradually lost much of its force, and the reflection of earthly objects and scenes became to a large degree biographical or reminiscent.