The Giza Project: Consolidated Archaeological Reference Database

 The Giza Project is an international collaboration led by Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The project is still ongoing, but soon will produce the GizaCARD, or Giza Consolidated Archaeological Reference Database. The purpose of this will be to represent a comprehensive and all-encompassing resource for the scholarly study of the Giza necropolis, and twenty three other nearby sites along the Nile River in Egypt and further south in Sudan. The team is in the process of consolidating excavation photos, maps and plans, original sketches, and diaries spanning the more than 100 years of excavation expeditions to the Giza Plateau and Pyramid Complex.

            Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University, Peter Der Manuelian has been the project leader since late July 2013, and previously acted as the director of the Giza Archive Project at the MFA from 2000 to 2011. Dr. Manuelian was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant of $300,000 in May of 2014. His goal was to bring visual aid into archeology in the form of 3D interactive models. An addition grant of $100,000 was awarded to Manuelian for his project Digital Giza: a New Portal to the Pyramids, which is a three dimensional visualization of the Pyramid of Khafre and the surrounding complex, ultimately to be a part of the Digital Giza Project website. Boston Globe writer Michael B. Farrell wrote that the website, “combines the feel of a video game…with the curated accuracy of a museum exhibit” (Boston Globe, Web App Giza 3D Offers Virtual Tour of the Pyramids, 7 May 2012). The land of the Pharaohs can be experienced two ways in Giza 3D. The user can either wander around and explore funerary chambers, objects, and rituals, or they can elect to be taken on a guided virtual tour by Dr. Manuelian. The Giza project teamed up with French company Dassault Systemès, who have an American office, referred to as the 3DS Boston Campus in Waltham, Massachusetts. They specialize in creating 3D designs and digital mockups for endeavors like the Giza Project. Using the thousands of photos and journals available through the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s Giza Archive, Dassault Systemes was able to digitally recreate an exploratory experience through the Giza complex that few since the ancient have been able to witness. The website is completely free, and available to anyone with access to an internet connection.  

            The Giza Archive is hosted by the MFA and currently boasts thousands of photos and original publications related to the archaeological expeditions in Giza. It originally began with the joint Harvard-MFA expedition which ran from 1902 to 1947 and was led by MFA Curator and Harvard Professor of Egyptology, George Reisner. The holdings are currently divided into eight searchable sections.

1.      Tomb and Monument Excavations

2.      Excavation Photos

3.      Ancient Object Records

4.      Records on People (ancient and modern)

5.      Diary Pages

6.      Maps and Plans

7.      A Digital Library of Books and Articles, mostly text searchable PDF’s, connected directly to records regarding the tombs, objects, or people.

8.      Unpublished manuscripts by George Reisner

The project is also experimenting with Interactive web technologies, where users can view and zoom in and out of satellite photos, as well as panoramic images, where viewers can rotate a full 360 degrees to see a site from all angles. Ultimately, the website will host over 170,000 digital files, including images from the glass lantern slide collection at Harvard’s Fine Arts Library. The Archive is collecting photos and documents from other collaborating institutions worldwide, from Cairo to Philadelphia, including Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna.

There are obvious successes with this project. Users now don’t have to spend vast amounts of money on plane tickets, transit, and hotel reservations to see these wonders of the ancient world. They can see the Pyramid of Khafre and the Sphinx from the comfort of their own couch. The downside to this is the huge loss of casual tourism revenue that Egypt will lose once the general public can access the Giza necropolis online anytime they choose. There is however a large proportion of people that would rather see the real thing than a virtual tour, no matter how accurate and informative. Another success is the accessibility that naturally comes with consolidation. Writings and photos that may have been accessible to visitors in the Neues Museum in Berlin, but few outside, are now being digitized and made fully available online. Not only that, but the information is being synthesized and used in photogrammetry to determine exact dimensions of spaces within the old sites. For users, we can also rejoice that project is being directed by Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts, because there are abundant resources and funding available to ensure that the images are digitized correctly, and that the information accompanying them is correct.

One downside, however, is that the information coming from the past one hundred years of excavation has a lot of Western bias, as many of the archaeologists were from America or western Europe. The information which users can access about different rooms or objects in the tour is pre-determined, and there is a very little agency for users, beyond choosing to do a self-guided tour.

I am sure one of the difficulties experienced for Manuelian and his team is that a project of this magnitude always has a lot of moving parts. There are huge amounts of information coming in from other continents, and all of it has to be maintained and organized with a chosen standard for the metadata. The Giza Archives website also briefly mentioned that a lot of the data was contradictory, which is a natural condition emerging from the initial study of any ancient culture. The inconsistencies have the be worked out, but some do slip through the cracks. The staff ask users to report any errors they find, as well as give feedback and information on how they used the archive, what they were looking for, etc.