Sunday, April 15, 2007

Weekly Websites

Weekly Websites has been missing for the last two weeks, mainly because I haven't been here very much. So here are some diverse pages to kick it off again.

OsirisNet
www.osirisnet.net
Another ruthless plug for a super online resource. OsirisNet need photographs to replace some which are no longer available. The photographs needed are listed here. Please help them out if you can! A staggering amount of work has gone into this site, which is completed in "spare" time.
With photographs, diagrams, descriptions and translations of texts, OsirisNet provides a virtual tour of tombs (and some temples) of ancient Egypt, from the Old Kingdom onwards. There are even virtual reality 3-d tours of some tombs:
There are also articles about aspects of the ancient Egyptian world:
In an email conversation the other day, Thierry said to me that he wanted people who might not be able to visit Egypt to be able to have total access, for free, to this astonishing unique piece of cultural heritage, and you have to hand it to Thierry - he is certainly bringing Egypt's monuments to life for a great many people.

Short report on Mons Claudianus
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/BA/ba28/ba28feat.html
"Most of us regard the desert as an inhospitable landscape, and associate it with hardship and scarcity of water and food. It has therefore long been assumed that in Roman times, a posting to work in the imperial stone quarries at Mons Claudianus in the deserts of eastern Egypt must have seemed like a prison sentence with hard labour. A number of classical authors, such as the 1st century AD Jewish writer Josephus, wrote that the forced labour of convicts and captives was used at such remote stone quarries - an implication that appeared intuitively to make sense. However, recent archaeological work at Mons Claudianus suggests that, at this quarry at least, a quite different story can now be told. The first full-scale excavations at the site, which are just now reaching publication, have revealed that throughout the two centuries of its operation, a skilled and well-paid civilian workforce was employed in the quarries, in conditions - judging by their diet - that might well be regarded as luxurious."
See the above for the rest of the report.

James Breasted's stereoscopic images of Egypt
http://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/newresearch/stereoscope/stereoscope.htm
In The Sandals of Pharaoh: James Henry Breasted and the Stereoscope
An occasional paper from the McClung Museum
By Elaine A. EvansCurator/Adjunct Assistant Professor
"Today, I invite you to travel with the eminent American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted (1865-1935) in his quest to promote ancient Egypt in the United States via the stereoscope. Essential to this journey was his partnership with the firm of Underwood & Underwood, the American Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century publisher of stereoscopic views. Documentation will be presented about the state of the stereoscopic industry, why the two principals came together in a successful relationship, and why James Henry Breasted realized the possibilities the stereoscope had to promote his cause. Why did a scholar of such renown decide to involve himself in the popular, stereoscopic world? These and other questions will be touched upon."

Eastern Desert archaeology photographs
http://www.barnard.nl/desert/
A long list of sites, accompanied by photographs and notes, all from Egypt's Eastern Desert.

An Egyptology News Blog in German
http://www.gitta-warnemuende.de/news01.html
I saw this posted at the bottom of the online version of the EEF News Digest - an Egyptology news blog written in German, for those of you for whom German is a better bet than English. It has been going since March 2006. I don't read German, but if Aayko has added a link for it, then I assume that it has merit!

The Archeaology Channel
http://www.archaeologychannel.org/
Featured videos, which play in Windows Media Player or RealPlayer.
Trial of a mummy
Egypt Gift of the Nile
Hieroglyphic text from the tomb of Sennefer

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