Digital Egypt: reconstructions from Egypt on the World Wide Web

This chapter focuses on a joint project, Digital Egypt for Universities, between CASA and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. Taking copyrighted images, we assemble an online resource on Egyptian archaeology, which offers a wide range of audio-visual representations of this ancient culture and its technology. In particular, we create 3-D reconstructions of a series of historic sites, which has never been created on such a scale in the field of Egyptology, for the purposes of learning and teaching. Although the subjects of many of our reconstructions are monuments and buildings that are now almost completely destroyed, we produce several models of the same sites based on different interpretations as a stimulus to scholarly debate and discussion. Three such exemplars are described in detail here: Hemamieh, a prehistoric settlement; Naqada, one of the earliest towns in Egypt; and Koptos, a temple from which several important fi nds reside in the Petrie Museum, including some of the earliest monumental sculptures.