To be published in: Kerry Muhlestein et al. (ed.), Proceedings of the International Conference Evolving Egypt — Innovation, Appropriation, and Reinterpretation in Ancient Egypt, Brigham Young University Hawaii (February 2006), 2008.

The so-called scenes of daily life, depicted in the private tombs of the Eighteenth dynasty, draw from a collective corpus the sets of themes that help the deceased be reborn in the beyond. Exact copies are rare, each artist treating such and such a subject in his own way, with his own sensitivity, thus offering a panel of variations on the same topic. Then when the brilliant painter of the tomb of Nakht (TT 52) revisits a scene from the tomb of Wah (TT 22), he rearranges its components with the obvious purpose of reinforcing their semiotic efficiency, and highlighting the presence of hermeneutic layers in seemingly prosaic scenes.