The Virtual Amarna Project

The pieces in the Virtual Amarna Museum come from the site of Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, the city built around 1350 BC by Pharaoh Akhenaten, as a place where he could centre his austere view of the cult of the sun, the Aten. The pieces illustrate not Akhenaten's own concerns, but the spiritual interests of the many thousands of people who came to live in the city. Although we can count Akhenaten as a monotheist, he seems not to have attempted an intolerant suppression of the beliefs and practices of most of his people. They continued to follow what was familiar to them, though we should not count this necessarily as a rejection of Akhenaten's ideas. Imposed conformity of belief belongs to much later periods of history, in Egypt and elsewhere. During the spring of 2008 and 2009, staff from the University of Arkansas, Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (Katie Simon and Christopher Goodmaster) joined the British archaeological mission to Tell el-Amarna (directed by Barry Kemp), bringing with them a 3D laser scanner. A series of objects housed in the site antiquities magazine (that is maintained under the supervision of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt) was selected for scanning, as an experiment in this form of recording. The selection was done by archaeologist Anna Stevens and was intended to illustrate the theme of personal religion at Amarna. It reflected a piece of research, 'Investing in religion in Akhenaten's Amarna', that had been funded by the Templeton Foundation through the University of Cambridge and had been conducted by Barry Kemp and Anna Stevens between 2006 and 2008. A series of significant objects form the Egyptian site of Amarna were digitized using a Konica Minolts Vivid 9i triangulation laser scanner. The digital objects are part of the Virtual Amarna Museum - a web based "museum" providing public access to these objects as part of the Amarna Project's web materials. A range of objects were involved - including stone stele, ceramics, pendants, moulds and selected architectural elements. A portion of the scanned objects were used a part of the LEAP II project and were placed in the ADS archive as part of that effort. The LEAP II project produced an article in Internet Archaeology that can be accessed at http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue30/limp_index.html. The article addresses the application of high-precision 3-D recording methods to heritage materials (portable objects), the technical processes involved, the various digital products and the role of 3-D recording in larger questions of scholarship and public interpretation