Talking Pyramids: Ancient Egyptian Pyramids

I thought I’d start a new schedule of reviewing an Egyptology website each week.
This week’s website review is on the Giza Archives Project.

The Giza Archives Project Website

The Giza Archives Project is a very useful and comprehensive online resource for anyone interested in the Giza Necropolis. Excavations that have occurred in the area are documented on the site. One such excavation undertaken by the Harvard University in conjunction with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts ran for 45 years from 1902 – 1947 and was under the direction of George A. Reisner. The archive collected from this expedition is currently housed in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard University.

The Museum of Fine Arts has been able to preserve a lot of this material and make it available online thanks to the the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Giza Archives Project website currently contains six categories of materials:

• about 22,000 black-and-white excavation photographs taken between 1902 and 1942
• about 3,106 Expedition Diary pages
• about 2,408 Object Register book pages (containing 19,544 individual object records)
• about 10,000 maps and plans, ranging from entire Giza cemeteries to individual burial shafts
• about 200 books and articles on Giza (a digital Library of PDF files)
• experiments in Interactive Web technologies, such as zoomable satellite photos and 360-degree panoramic views of the site using Quicktime Virtual Reality (QTVR) and other technologies.

More is being added to this collection as they continue to build the site. Additional Expedition materials from all over the world are currently being prepared. Some of these include:

• Thousands of additional maps, plans, and lime drawings of Giza tombs, wall scenes, and objects;
• Thousands of new object records and photographs from partner institutions in Berkeley, Berlin, Cairo, Hildesheim, Leipzig, Philadelphia, Turin, and Vienna;
• modern colored renderings of decorated tomb walls by Harvard’s Expedition staff;
• Ongoing: Multi-lingual Egyptological Thesaurus terminology (METS) to describe wall scene content and artifacts;
• packing lists and photographs recording the original expedition shipments to Boston;
• miscellaneous Harvard MFA Expedition manuscripts, lists, and notebooks directly relating to finds and excavation data;
• unpublished, illustrated Harvard MFA Expedition field season reports;
• notebooks on color and palaeography at Giza;
• lists and registers of hieroglyphic personal names and titles

Sections of the website:

News
You can keep up with all the latest additions to the site and press releases here.

The Library:
As noted by Chuck Jones of the Ancient World Online (thanks Andie), the Giza Archives Project has a list of articles on the Giza Necropolis that are freely available in the Library section of the site.

This page presents a freely accessible, online library of monographs, articles, and manuscripts on the Giza Necropolis. Converted to PDF format, these publications fill two Egyptological needs:

The current inventory of the Giza Library includes every Giza book and article by the members of the Harvard University’s Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition (George Reisner, William Stevenson Smith, Dows Dunham, etc.), as well as every Egyptian and Nubian article ever published in the Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (BMFA). It also includes all volumes of the more recent Giza Mastabas Series, edited by Peter Der Manuelian and William Kelly Simpson. Finally, current scholarship is also well represented.

Interactive
The Interactive section of the website has maps, plans, 360 panoramas, immersive photography and more. Also included are possible future inclusions of video and audio files.

Two possible Audio candidates listed that I would find very interesting are:

# February 6, 1938, 11:00 pm: live NBC interview from the entrance to the Great Pyramid at Giza (George Reisner, William Stevenson Smith, Miss Mary Reisner, Selim Hassan, Walter Bryan Emery, Rex Keating, Edward Chorlain) [about 20 minutes]

# “Mother of Cheops:” 1950 BBC documentary on the 1925 discovery of the tomb of Queen Hetep-heres (G 7000 X) [about 1 hour]

There was a detailed feature story on the Giza Archives Project by Peter Der Manuelian that gives a lot of the background story published in KMT magazine vol. 16 Number 3, from 2005. You can order it directly from KMT.

KMT vol. 16, no.3

Or you can just dive straight into the website: Giza Archives Project

Related posts:

1. Giza Archives Project Wins 2010 Award The Giza Archives Project at the Museum of Fine Arts...
2. Update on the ‘Giza Caves’ from P Manuelian Entrance to the 'Giza Caves' Director of the Giza Archives...
3. The Giza Archives: Site Update The Giza Archives have been updated with a range of...
4. Publication: Giza Mastabas 8 Giza Mastabas VIII: Mastabas of Nucleus Cemetery G 2100, Major...
5. The 3D Giza Plateau & Virtual Archaeology Experience the Giza Plateau in 3D The Giza Archives Project...

Tags: Giza, Websites

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 2:16 am and is filed under Audio, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.