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Objectives
Comparison of the ancient built environment is often difficult due to different standards used in publications. Correctness, drawing style, as well as the indication of materials, damage, or conjecture differ widely. The quality of the drawings varies greatly, from almost impressionistic sketches to stone-by-stone renderings. Furthermore drawings of ancient Egyptian architecture are sometimes only available in obscure and difficult to find publications, or not published at all.
In order to enable cross-disciplinary work, and make the drawings broadly accessible to architects, Egyptologists, historians, art historians and the general public, the central purpose of the project is two-fold: A) provide one visual language by using the same clearly outlined conventions in all drawings. B) provide annotations in the form of extensive metadata, which give factual information and a 'critical apparatus' for visual representations, outlining sources, producers, methods and purposes of the drawings.
The DAI Cairo and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) are cooperating in the project to present, document, and publish architectural data on ancient Egyptian monuments in a standardized way. The project aims to improve the present state of architectural representations by providing redrawn, standardized and vetted plans, based on existing publications and in selected cases field checking. The information will be documented and searchable through extensive metadata, and presented as an online archive of images (TIFF and JPEG) to scale, as well as CAD files. The production of the metadata will help identify and prioritize needs for further documentation, and provide entirely new research questions and agendas. The selection of objects to be described, redrawn and published in the three year project provides a well balanced archive which gives a complete overview of the most important architectural building types, material elements and individual monuments. A variety of buildings such as huts, houses, palaces, large and small tombs, provincial temples, magazines, work shops, as well as specific royal cemeteries and famous temples will be presented, without limitation to or focus on 'classical' eras of the Egyptian culture. The overview will include diachronical, functional and regional perspectives.
The architectural representations will be made freely available through the DAI website, the UCLA Digital Library, as well as the online UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology Open Version, and will be integrated in the subscription based UEE Full Version with extensive links to articles, photographs, and the interactive time map.
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