Last week, I opened the eyes of readers to the central role modern technology plays today in the process of heritage documentation. This week, I would like to give an example on how indispensable modern technology has become in this field of work.
Egyptian artifacts are scattered all over the museums of the world. I believe that the dream of every Egyptologist and every ordinary man, with a bit of passion for Ancient Egypt, is to have easy accessibility to all these different collections.
A few years ago, modern technology opened the doors to realizing this dream when a group of scientists under the coordination of Professor Van der Plas from Holland collaborated to putting Egyptian collections in 13 European museums onto one Website.
These Museums are in Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin, Florence, Hildesheim, Leiden, Lille, Lisbon, Liverpool, Madrid, Mariemont, St. Petersburg and Vienna.
For this system to be accessible to everyone, bearing in mind that these museums are in different countries talking different languages, it was essential to develop it in seven different European languages; English, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Spanish and Portuguese.
An enormous effort was made to build a unified thesaurus. In order to achieve that, and the website (www.globalegyptianmuseum.org) was finally created.
This project is now being hosted by the Egyptian Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural heritage (Cultnat) and the Arabic language has been added to it, along with objects from the Egyptian Museum and the Archaeological Museum of the Library of Alexandria.
A huge collection of Ancient Egyptian treasures is just a mouse click away. All you have to do is to sit in front of a computer, specify the object you would like to look up (let’s say a wooden statue from the Middle Kingdom), and there would appear in front of you thumbnails of all objects possible matching this category.
You might find 20 objects satisfying your request: two from Leiden, three from Lille, two from the Egyptian Museum, etc.
When you select one of the thumbnails, you get an enlarged color picture of it, together with a full description and a set of standard data, including which dynasty it belongs to, in which site it was found, the date of the excavation and the date and manner of its acquisition.
Beside these facilities, you can click again to switch from any one of the eight languages available to another. This system brings objects from different museums together in one single virtual museum.
It provides 3D visualizations of the objects and gives panoramic views of the halls of the different museums. The site also contains a glossary for the terminology used and a special section for children from eight to twelve years old.
This is just one example of the numerous applications of modern technology in the field of documentation.
