Digital Davies: The Rock Tombs of El-Amarna

My project "Digital Davies: The Rock Tombs of El-Amarna" (Digital Davies) seeks to preserve and expand upon Norman de Garis Davies' six volume publication of the non-royal tombs of Amarna.

Between 1905 and 1908 the Egyptologist Norman de Garis Davies published The Rock Tombs of El-Amarna as part of the Egypt Exploration Fund's Archaeological Survey of Egypt series.  The resulting six volumes focus primarily on the decorated tombs of the ancient city, and include descriptions and interpretations of the architecture and decoration as well as Davies' line-drawings of the reliefs that decorate these tombs and their accompanying texts.

Despite their age, these books remain the best record we have of the decoration of these tombs. Unfortunately, as the books themselves get older, it gets more and more difficult for scholars to access them.  The pages become increasingly brittle to the point where merely turning the page can cause damage. Many online scans do exist, but they are typically of low-quality, and almost always focus primarily on the text.  The resulting images of the line-drawings are often blurry, or left out entirely.

Digital Davies is a multi-phase project undertaken in partnership with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) that will allow for more useful and efficient access to these invaluable texts. 

 

The stages of this project are as follows:

  • Phase One - Digitization

  • Phase two - readux

  • Phase Three - Prototype model: Tomb of Mery-rE I

  • Phase Four - Full 3d Model: Tomb of Mery-Re I

  • Phase Five - 3d modeling of remaining tombs

  • Beyond?

 

Phase One -Digitization

(complete!)

During this phase of the project, the six volumes of The Rock Tombs of El-Amarna owned by Emory University's library will be scanned with special attention given to ensure the high quality of the resulting images, especially the line-drawings.

 

Phase Two - Readux

(complete!)

Readux is open-source software designed by Emory's Library and Information Technology Services (LITS) Software Development Team in partnership with ECDS, Emory's various libraries and Wayne State University. Funding for Readux has been provided by the Mellon Foundation.

Readux is designed as a platform that enables not only the sharing of primary source material, but also the publishing of multimedia annotations.  This software is designed to facilitate a wide variety of teaching and research projects, and to ensure free public access to important primary sources.

During phase two of Digital Davies, the high quality scans of The Rock Tombs of Amarna will be made available via Readux.  This will allow scholars, professors, and students of Egyptology from around the world to access, annotate, and customize these volumes for free.

 

Phase Three- Prototype model: Tomb of Mery-rE I

(complete!)

In the third stage of Digital Davies, I will prepare a preliminary 3D model of the Tomb of Meryra I as described by Davies in part one of The Rock Cut Tombs. This model will serve as a prototype for Phase Four: 3D models of the remaining tombs.

The aim of these 3D models is not to produce a likeness of the tombs as they appear today, but rather to provide a three-dimensional representation of the tombs as described by Davies.  The model has been built using measurements calculated from Davies’ scaled drawings of the tomb’s plan. 

Once the three dimensional tomb structure was built, the high-quality scans of the line drawings were mapped over the surfaces, transforming the flat surface of the book into a navigable space.

Phase Four -Full 3d Model: Tomb of Mery-Re I

(in progress)

Currently, I am refining the preliminary model. Details such as the arched ceilings, the corniced doorways, the papyriform columns, and the uneven floors will be added. Other elements, such as decoration that Davies’ described in the body of his work but did not reproduce in line-drawing will also be added. This will be a difficult and time consuming process that combines close reading of Davies’ works with careful study of the tombs themselves.

Phase Five - 3d modeling of remaining tombs

The final phase of this project will build 3D models of the remaining tombs published in The Rock Cut Tombs of El-Amarna.

 

Beyond?

The end of phase four of Digital Davies is only the beginning! Future expansion of this project includes: colorization, translations of hieroglyphic text into English and other languages, and more!

 

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Joanna Mundy for her guidance in launching this project, to Joe Fritsch for teaching me the essentials of 3Ds Max, and to Sarah Shipman for her Photoshop tutorial. Without them this project would not be possible.