That's just bonkers. So much writing on the walls! I wish the navigation was a little more like a FPS and less like Myst III, but I had to keep reminding myself: this isn't some level designer from 2000's, this is an actual tomb designer vision from 5000 years ago. Just bizarre. I wonder what it would look like illuminated by torchlight.
In case you missed it - you can switch from the default streetview/Myst-like interactions to "dollhouse" mode and fly through with WASD/mouse/arrow keys. Not exactly FPS controls but closer. However, the gaps in the data are much more apparent that way.
The gamer in me is a little disappointed by the real thing. I'm imagining Lara Croft walking down this corridor, and then, turning around and walking right back out.
I wonder why it isn't more like an FPS. I understand there's more modelling work involved, but it would totally rock. Imagine if advanced engines like Unreal were put to work for this kind of things instead of just for games.
It does but in the first person view it looks like it's doing the Google Streetview thing where you have waypoints of 360-degree camera shots mapped onto the 3D model rather than one generated solid 3D model. I'm guessing it's because the texture mapping would be tricky to get at high resolution but still work on most machines or something like that.
Seeing it like this kills all mystic notions I had regarding these tombs. And I don't mean this in a negative way, it sort of opens your eyes to what this thing actually is - a conglomeration, made by many artists and engineers, pouring their hearts and souls into building something to last a millennia. Truly beautiful.
That is until you remember it was all in service of some rich guy who thought he was a god, and had them build this as a monument to his supposed might. Ironically, his existence was entirely inconsequential, and merely provided an excuse for the true geniuses of the time to tunnel their talents into a magnum opus. They, together, were the true gods.
Only true ideals transcend time, and any individual thinking himself a god would be wise to acknowledge that; you can become a god only if you let youself die and embody an ideal fully.
Ramesses missed the point so hard it's hilarious.
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I'm not an expert in any way, but aren't you jumping to conclusions (or rather, we, collectively) about what the builders were like, what their worldview was, etc? We don't even know when the pyramids were built, or how. There's a lot of writtings and drawings and other archaelogical treasures left behind; but still, are we at a point where we can say we understand the building, builders and their world? Maybe it's just the inner child in me that wants these things to remain a mystery forever...
Actually, "we" have a fairly good idea when the 115-140-or-so Pyramids were built. We also know a great deal about their construction — the engineers who built them couldn't help but bragging about it. What we don't know is the precise method for moving the blocks up the pyramid. The problem is that Herodotus claims that the ancients hadn't invented cranes, yet, so the pyramids (he's probably discussing the pyramids at Giza) had to have been constructed via a ramp. A damning piece of counterevidence to Herodotus' claim is that the shadoof predates the pyramids, so it's not too far fetched to imagine they might have had some piece of equipment like this.
What's missing is a definitive historical statement; remember, historians require written evidence. Most of our evidence for the building of the pyramids is archeological. The sorts of building devices needed for the pyramids would've been generally useful for all construction — so they wouldn't have been left to rot at the pyramid build site, but repurposed until destruction.
The job of Ramses was diverting colossal resources for decades to make the whole thing possible, and give all these brilliant engineers and artists the medium that will withstand millenia.
Maybe it's not the most beautiful job, but still important and not necessarily easy.
By that way, the pyramid also embodies work of all the stone cutters, animal drivers, all the way to peasants who produced food to feed all them. It was an effort of an entire country.
While I really respect the need to preserve these places as-is, I can't help but wonder if these AR/VR/virtual presence platforms could be a great way to give us a view into how these places may have looked when they were original and all the walls were freshly carved and painted.
This coupled with the future potential for being able to offer sythesized lightfields/holographic is ridiculously appealing to me.
The first comment there is a great list of other virtual tours. Anyone have a list of these that work with VR (as in, with a Vive or Rift on your head).
Stupid question but a serious one on my end : I would pay to get an actual guide to go through this and teach me, just like I did on travel. Would you?
It seems like between the environment, Covid and the geopolitical situations in many places it could be a way to still feel like I can enjoy some of the priceless pieces the humans have created.
Last year High Fidelity took one of these tombs and built a VR version that they had an Egyptologist doing tours in. Was pretty cool, sad that they closed the platform.
Oh my that sounds exactly like what I mean. Someone that would carry me through the magic of the place live :). I'll have a look if I can find some resources about it thanks!
Cheers! In my case the live experience does matter a lot though. Otherwise I could also watch a documentary in HR for example. I'd like someone to make me live the place
I was impressed by this when it was posted a bit ago and am still impressed.
What's funny is that right after seeing this, my neighbors were selling their house. I checked out the listing and they had this same technology for a COVID-19 walkthrough linked right on the redfin page. They got two offers within a week. Pretty shcmancy!
If you turn around immediately, you'll notice the ancient Egyptian mailbox next to the metal gate... and you can now write Ramesses a nice personal letter: "I know what you're going through - I too often feel like I'm buried under a ton of bricks." etc.
First thought I had is, it is so beautiful, the lighting was perfect. I didn't expect the details of texture, glyphs and color from few thousand year old tomb. Pharaoh himself would be surprised to see his tomb like this.
There are lots and lots of hieroglyph written on these walls. I'm assuming that the researchers have deciphered what those means (Rosetta Stone)? I really wish I could read what these means in English. That would really give a great insights about what people (maybe the pharaohs and/or rich people who can afford to build tombs like that) during that time thought was important/noteworthy.
As someone who has a decent grasp of Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs, I think your enthusiasm for these texts would be destroyed by reading them. I know from experience that the quickest way to bore someone I'm guiding through an Egyptian exhibit is to start reading and translating inscriptions. The context for much of what is written is more impenetrable than the language itself. You pick up a lot of that context by necessity in learning the language but it doesn't come through in translation.
Powerful rulers subdue their enemies. It's a common formula seen over and over in various royal tombs and elsewhere. Sometimes, like in the case of the Libyans in some periods, the enemies the king claims domination over haven't been seen or heard from in generations. These kinds of inscriptions can tell us interesting things about foreign relations sometimes, but it's not the type of thing that's easy to extract.
As karatestomp states, there are far more interesting texts out there. The Story of Sinuhe says more about the milieu it was written in than most monumental or funerary inscriptions. It also happens to be one of the world's earliest surviving literary masterpieces. The Story of Wenamun argues against the common notion that the ancient Egyptians didn't have a sense of humor.
If you're still reading, thank you for the detailed explanation and references. I hadn't heard of Wenamun. Sinuhe rings a bell, maybe a novel? I have some digging to do :)
Lichtheim edited a 3-volume "Ancient Egyptian Literature" which contains a lot of funerary inscriptions. I'd second wl's post above: if you don't have tolerance for really dull writing, avoid.
Almost all of that "genre" is of the "seen one, seem them all" variety. Most of it's very formulaic—think nicene creed or traditional church hymns, but less interesting. There were a bunch of standard texts that were reproduced on many tombs, and as time went on this body of necessary texts grew, so that's very likely what a lot of this is. Sometimes you'd get some passages of history but those are usually about as dry as the tombs themselves. More often those are on monuments, not buried in tombs, anyway.
"Mirrors for princes" (instruction texts for rulers, often both moral and practical in nature), scribal training texts (yes, really), and their few actual stories that survive, are all way more interesting than the stuff inscribed in tombs, in general. A lot of those don't survive in hieroglyphs, though, but in hieratic or demotic script.
It's truly impressive and jaw dropping but what's maddening to me is that what you see in there is exactly how it is in real life, i.e. the walkways are just like that and people can actually reach out and touch the walls. At least based on my visits to Luxor, very few tombs have acrylic/glass wall protections to prevent it but it's ridiculously common to see tourists in some of the tombs doing that, it's sad and revolting as hell despite such great beauty hypnotizing you.
>At least based on my visits to Luxor, very few tombs have acrylic/glass wall protections to prevent it but it's ridiculously common to see tourists in some of the tombs doing that
I understand the sentiment, however I'm personally not in favour of modelling everything in society to account for the lowest common denominator and sterilizing everything in sight in response.
The issues you mention are nothing that couldn't be solved by advertising hefty fines and enforcing them.
Without saying which way is better, your claiming that fines are more 'direct' than putting physical barriers in the way is blatantly not true, barriers being the ultimate direct prevention.
I'm talking about direct retribution over prevention i.e. people visiting the sites without touching anything aren't directly impacted by those who do touch, however they're directly impacted by putting up glossy glass over those same sites.
Those visiting the sites who do touch that which they're told not to face direct retribution and serve as a warning to others not to do the same.
I am not sure if that's the right approach - that would be like deciding to punish animals in a zoo for crossing a line instead of having physical barriers installed.
Hmm, if it's just rules/fines, the chances are 0% that no one touches the thing, because it seems like guaranteed that an idiot will one day walk in there and touch something they're not meant to touch.
So if you want to preserve it, probably barriers/distance is the only good enough protection.
Putting any of this on display, barriers or no, means you're slowly destroying it. If preservation were the primary aim, nobody would be allowed inside except epigraphers and photographers. Want to see these monuments? Look at the photographs, drawings, and models like this.
You'd be surprised how many "closed to tourists" tombs you can get into with a local guide and a few notes changing hands as well (or it was easy 15+ years ago).
Was there last year.. most tour/tomb guards expected to be tipped and the more you wanted to take pictures (technically not allowed in most places) the more you tipped.
That was the first time I thought I may not need to visit a place in person ( not an expert; seeing it in person would be unlilely to yield a different reaction / insights ). Maybe virtual tourism could be a thing for sites like these.
The artifacts of the capture and rendering process strike me as deeply weird - they do funny things to my brain as I navigate around. I've done some photogrammetry so I understand why they exist - they have chosen to never show the holes in the mesh - but I've never seen exactly this aesthetic effect. Maybe someone could use this as a video effect like Radiohead did for lidar point clouds a tech generation ago.
This is really cool! It would be awesome if there was an automatic way to export something like this to a map you can load in some high res FPS like half life 2 or a newer one.
I would like an option to toggle 'How it looked like when it was constructed' which shows rendered image of the historical architecture in its pristine condition[1]. Like, Pyramid's white limestone finish.
I can’t be the only person who finds this kind of presentation hard to navigate on a phone. It’s also why I go to my desktop to use google street view.... ideally it would degrade to something more approachable with swiping gestures and/or visual clues to controls.
Nonetheless, this is extremely cool (no knock on this specific project for the above problems) and I’m looking forward to poking around tonight.
I wonder if the motif of the eagle with its wings spread originated from around this time. In case you miss it, look up at the doorways to the levels; truly beautiful work there and very well preserved (probably due to it being out of normal reach).
Was impressed, until I got to the very end, were you see multiple depictions of people being beheaded. (With blood fountains from their neck.) You then remember that pharaohs were not gentle people.
Incredible :-). Though I can't help but feel those wooden light-boxes take away from the grandness of it. They look like something hammered together by a weekend hobbyist.
I love digital explorations like this, but the step length of these google maps style walkthroughs drive me insane. I often want to look at the detail of something that happens to be in between two steps, and it's just not possible.
