- Project: Resuscitate Pharaonic Treasures
- Antiquities.Egypt launches virtual visits to its pharaonic monuments closed by the pandemic
From a funeral mask to a glass of Canopo. The thousand-year-old treasures of a Spanish archaeological mission, which has been excavating for more than a decade in southern Egypt, are now within a click, gathered on a web page that offers those passionate about the time of the Pharaohs the possibility of approaching, through its three-dimensional reconstructions, the results of one of the most solid scientific projects in home Egyptology.
"The idea was that people, who now have much more time, could approach in more detail some aspects of the mission," Alejandro Jimenez, professor at the University of Jaén and director of the project that pierced the hill of Qubbet al Hawa in Aswan, about 900 kilometers south of Cairo. The Sketchfab platform houses up to 28 pieces scanned on-site during archaeological campaigns.
It is the selection, made by the multidisciplinary team from the nearly one hundred objects that have gone through the scanner in the last five years, in a pioneering initiative among foreign missions working in the Arab country. "Those pieces that can offer a satisfactory experience for the user have been opened to the public," says Libertad Serrano, a researcher on the project preparing a doctoral thesis on the transfer of heritage in virtual formats.
Libertad is responsible for this type of digital museum that exhibits some of the jewels rescued from the necropolis where the governors of Elephantine found eternal rest. "The public exhibition possibilities are very novel and powerful. You cannot miss this opportunity to disseminate the research results," he argues. The objects are part of the didactic program that the team develops in educational centers and in scientific dissemination activities.
The confinement caused by the spread of the coronavirus has led the expedition to open the gallery to Internet users and the legion of fans that Egyptology has. "They have been selected for their historical or aesthetic value. They are pieces to which we have more difficult access later on because they are stored in warehouses of the Ministry of Antiquities and that we will have to revisit in the future to investigate them. It is more comfortable to have them in virtual format" , indicates Jiménez.
The digitization of the pharaonic heritage that has emerged in the geography of hollows that make up the cemetery also provides a solution to the prohibition of the Egyptian authorities to export the pieces . The project to rebuild them in 3D was born in 2015. Since then, a structured light scanner has been taking minutes of the collection of parts. "It has a resolution of 32 megapixels and an accuracy of 0.1 millimeters to 20 microns. The scanned pieces are geometrically exact to the original ones," says Serrano.
The initiative allows facsimiles of objects to be created with 3D printers and thus to fill one of the weaknesses of the discipline in Spain, where - unlike the United Kingdom, Italy or France - there is not a lot of Pharaonic art collections. The tool that the Covid-19 has made accessible is a complete window to the site of Qubbet al Hawa: it offers the location of the tomb where the objects were found and suggests related academic articles, photographs and detailed explanations.
"The traditional posters of the physical museums are converted here into emerging annotations within the platform. We have decided to place graphic information on the origin of the find and point out the burial on the general plan of the necropolis, playing with all the possibilities," says the researcher, as a cicerone.
From the universe of pieces, Serrano chooses two: the anastilosis of Ptah Sokar Osiris and the stele of the lady Sattjeni. "The first allowed me to do a work of virtual reconstruction of the piece. It is a sample of the ability of virtual archeology to make recoverable reconstructions, in which nothing is eternal unlike physical restoration ," argues the expert. "The stele is itself a very beautiful piece of a woman with great interest because it is not linked to any marriage and had significant purchasing power."
Instead, the project manager prefers Governor Sarenput's shabti (funeral statuette). "Aesthetically it is very beautiful and was kept in a small sarcophagus covered with a beaded mesh. Unfortunately, we only found the beads. The threads had disappeared," says Jiménez.
Millennia hidden under the sand
One of the most striking objects in the collection, which remained for millennia under the sand, is a New Year's Canteen. "It stored the waters of the flood of the Nile, which in Ancient Egypt was related to the regeneration of life and the rebirth of the deceased in the afterlife. The canteen was accompanying a deceased. The most curious thing is that it contained the cartridge of the king. Something not so common that allowed us to confirm the historical period in which he lived. "
The platform invites the user to become a transcript of an archaeologist, examining the pieces in detail; marveling at them at zoom; and discovering the secrets of a civilization that still fascinates in abundance. "I would digitize all the pieces," Serrano jokes. " Each one has its life and its particular interest ," he outlines.
"All virtual tools are very educational and promote respect for the real piece," he says, before acknowledging that the experience is "different" from the emotions that an original piece can arouse. "The approach to material culture from an intellectual level is similar, but then there are other levels, those of sensations and emotions, that are capable of raising heritage on closer inspection, which are not comparable," he concludes.
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