SPEAKER: So here is our model of the entire Giza Necropolis.
You'll see we've had to remove modern structures and excavators' debris
dumps.
We studied the Nile, and we had to move it much closer to the Giza pyramids,
because in antiquity, the Nile did flow closer.
And we've tried to rebuild each and every structure.
Not all of them are yet in the level of detail that we would like,
but we had most of them in place.
The Sphinx is probably the most accurate reconstruction
that has been attempted so far.
And you can see the central field mastabas, the Eastern cemetery,
the West, all of the major components in place.
This is now the centralized study tool and research tool.
And as we link all these diverse data, we
hope that you'll eventually be able to navigate anywhere
you want to go, click on anything that grabs your interest,
and up will pop the related diverse information.
That extends to the Sphinx as well.
And what's fascinating about this type of 3D visualization
is it calls up questions that you may not have
considered in more traditional avenues.
So for example, color on the Sphinx, was the Sphinx entirely painted?
Was just the head painted?
We don't have enough surviving exterior blocks
to really come to a secure conclusion about that.
So we study what we can, and we have to move forward with the best information
that we have at the time.
This comparison image of our 3D model shows you
two possibilities above just the head.
And the Nimitz head cloth is painted.
Down below the entire body is painted in the reddish brown
reserved for male figures.
What do you think?
Another important aspect of visualization
is of course the z-axis, time.
So we can look at Giza when everything is complete.
We can look the Giza at the very beginnings
when the Great Pyramid is just starting to rise.
And in this video snippet, you can see the Quarry
where a lot of the core blocks are being cut for the Great Pyramid complex.
We'll look at some of these in more detail in other sections
of this module and other modules.
This photo shows the pyramid temple of Khafre,
a builder of the second pyramid in today's rather ruinous state,
and then the computer model restores it all.
This is based on our study of the architectural features of royal pyramid
complexes from the Old Kingdom.
And to date, it's the best reconstruction
that we've been able to produce.
Seated statues of Khafre, he probably adorned the courtyard.
And in the image, you can see the model bark
being brought into one of the chambers.
This allows us to experiment with the size of this bark or boat carrying
a statue of the King and whether it's big enough or small enough to actually
fit between the doors of the temple.
Here is a still rendering from the Sphinx area and the Sphinx
temple in front of it and then adjacent to it, Khafre Valley Temple.
And you'll notice the harbor coming right up close to the entrance
to the temple.
Inside Khafre's Valley Temple, there are emplacements,
little slots in the floor that were meant
to hold seated statues of the King.
Here again, visualization can help us.
And the other images that you see here, we've
had to play with the size of the Khafre statues,
trying to understand based on the floor emplacements how large
or how small the statue should be or just how big the platform
or base for each one might be.
This video shows a reenactment of the so-called opening of the mouth
ceremony.
That's the reanimation ceremony for the deceased King
meant to magically and ritually bring him back to life for the nether world.
We've placed the ceremony inside Khufu's pyramid temple.
And again, interesting questions come up when you do this kind of visualization
now with avatars or human characters.
So they're ancient Egyptians all over the scene,
but how many should there be?
What should they be wearing?
Where are the regular Egyptians?
Are they allowed anywhere near this ceremony, or indeed anywhere near Giza
at all?
Is it daytime or nighttime?
Did this ceremony even take place in this temple
or in some other kind of purification tent or temporary location?
We've also modeled the faces on some of these characters
after the ancient Egyptians whose statues were found nearby
in their various tombs.
So we have King Djedefre, who succeeded Khufu.
We have an Ankhaf, a vizier who was instrumental perhaps in Khufu and maybe
even into Khafre's reign.
And we have Hemiunu, the architect and engineer
who probably oversaw the construction of the Great Pyramid itself.
Another aspect of visualization allows us to dive down a burial shaft.
This time we're going to a plundered burial chamber, so not too much to see.
But the interesting point here is that we've
chosen to reconstruct the appearance not in the Fourth Dynasty,
not in antiquity, but rather as it looked in 1906, the year
that George Reisner and the excavation team cleared this burial chamber.
So it's a plundered room.
And first, we'll show some photographs of how it looked in 1906.
Again, a plundered room, just some blocks
lying on the floor, some pieces of wood from the coffin,
some bones from the burial, and there is a little depression
in one corner where the original canopic jars would have been located,
holding the internal organs of the deceased.
As we go into the computer model now, we see
that we have reconstructed everything in beautiful color
just as it was in Reisner's drawings and black and white photography from 1906.
No one has been down here since that time,
so it's a pretty accurate and interesting rendering.
Again, you see the blocks on the floor, the pieces of wood, the bones.
And in fact, from these bones which we've located in a storeroom at Giza
and from inscriptions in a nearby tomb, we've
actually been able to identify the owner of this mastaba.
She was a woman named Sedit, and she's the mother
of Merib, whose beautifully decorated tomb is right next door and whose
chapel was removed in the 1840s and can now be seen in the Berlin Neues Museum.
The other wonderful thing about this type of visualization
is that we can come outside of the chamber into the limestone bedrock
if you will and sort of swim around as no human being can do and get
the underground view of Giza, what I call the "tombs-eye view."
So imagine when all of these hundreds and hundreds of burial shafts
are modeled in such detail as we see here in the case of the burial
chamber of Sedit.
Where is all this going?
Well new technologies are coming up all the time.
Some of them are fantastic.
Some of them are based on older technologies.
You're all familiar with the old stereo view cameras and view devices
from the old days.
Well that's all many of these 360-degree and panoramic
and stereoscopic headsets are producing for us as well.
So we'll carry that further and try to make Giza ever more accessible.
We can even start to recreate the archaeologists themselves.
So one day you may be seeing George Reisner and some
of the others leading you on tours of various areas around Giza themselves.
In this example, we're entering a beautifully painted chapel
of Queen Meresankh III.
This was discovered by the Harvard MFA expedition in 1927, of course,
in the last day of work as you'd expect.
Inside were beautifully preserved well paintings of the Queen's chapel.
And tourists can actually visit this tomb today
and see it in all of its glory.
Normally, we couldn't restore all the colors like this without some guidance.
But because the colors remained so beautifully preserved,
we have just about all the information we
need in order to put it back together.
And finally, other experimentation lets us look at individual tomb walls,
click on objects, and have them pop out of the wall in 3D,
so you can rotate them around.
Imagine being able to click on any element--
a person, a fan, a chest, a box, element of livestock or craftsmanship--
and have it appear in 3D so that you can study it in more detail.
These are just some of the experiments that we're
playing with in our visualization attempts with Giza 3D.
Where is all of this going?
Possibly right into your pocket.
It should be possible now to serve edutourism,
to be able to go to a museum, aim your phone at an object,
and see the original discovery.
Or go out to Giza, aim your phone at a lump of mud or a ruined floor
foundation and see the original temple that once rose there
or the location of a statue that was once found in that particular location.
In addition, in recent years, colleagues have
been showering the pyramids with cosmic particle rays, muons, in an attempt
to locate unknown chambers and otherwise hidden cavities.
We're working on different pathways to allow
you to get into Giza whether you know everything about the site
or nothing about the site.
So there should be something for everyone
in our efforts to make Giza more accessible to the experts
and the amateurs alike.
And I'll finish with just this comparison,
because as we produce all this material, we constantly
think what's going to survive, how do we make this sustainable.
Up above you see a typical hard drive.
Down below you see a slab stele.
Which one of these do you think will still be readable in a few years?