Musty Old Books on Egypt

April 18, 2008

One peculiar joy of working on ancient Egypt is the chance to dive into the large and generally musty books that hold the reproductions made during long past excavations. Beginning with the Description de l'Egypte compiled by the French expedition around 1800, the call has been to record what remains of Egypt by reproducing it in expensive books. These books can be weirdly persnickety when it comes to recording every detail of a structure. There seems to be an unspoken philosophy of history at work: the only thing that is truly lasting is a book.. so, somehow, all knowledge must be settled into that format. These ancient tombs resist, but if one tries hard enough—i.e. makes the book big enough—these walls and structures can be textualized.

These old books take a fair amount of time to read well. They represent space but they do so through a strange combination of prose description, maps, and pictorial plates. By taking the time with these books it is possible to begin to imagine how a tomb looked.. but this process of reading and imagining is counterintuitive for many people. Our contemporary options for representing space are so much wider.. and don't always involve turning a place into a book.

Note the following map of the burial of Ptahhetep:

The writing on the map is my own, left there as I figured out how the low-relief cut images were aligned on the walls of the burial chapel of Ptahhetep. Once I get the alignment I can go back and look at the reproductions of the images and imagine them in their mortuary chapel context.

This textual game of imagine-the-tomb should be much easier with the internet. All one has to do is make each wall on the map clickable.. and zoom the viewer to an image of the wall at each point. Wandering back and forth between map, text, and image could be eliminated as each of these elements would be combined in this version. The internet has a much greater ability (hardly tapped yet) than a book when it comes to allowing for intuitive exploration of space.

Many of these old books are out of copyright.. and it is fun to start imagining how easily all this information could be settled on the internet. But it has to be done right. Google Books has a copy of the tomb of Ptahhetep (link here). This is fine, but Google has a one-size-fits-all approach to books, and instead of making sure the images are top quality it is fed through the same Googlization process.

Last night I ran into a fascinating site that makes use of the line drawings from the same book.. although the quality of the reproductions is not great. This site is augmented by modern pictures of the same site.. and an updated version of the site map I reproduce above. This is a step in the right direction: the point should be to interweave text and photos and link to them from a map.

The challenge for scholarship on the internet is that it needs to be conceptualized as an instance of adaptation.. not simply as space for a data dump from which some scholar can print an article. Once this all clicks for people then we will begin to see beautiful virtual spaces to explore and savor. Egyptology, with its many examples of scholarly re-imagination in three dimmensional space, is a field that should be an inspiration to web design.