Lecture
LUCDH Lunchtime Speaker Series: Developing a Proof of Concept on the digital documentation of Theban Tomb 45 (Luxor, Egypt): some recent results on geo-referenced 3D modelling
- Date
- Tuesday 2 May 2023
- Time
- Explanation
- Livestream only (not recorded). Tuesday, 2 May 2023 at 12:00 – 13:00 (time in Leiden).
- Address
- Online via Kaltura Live Rooms
- Room
- Please register via lucdh@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Please join us for the livestream of our next LUCDH lunchtime talk presented online by Dr. Carina van den Hoven and Ir. Robert Voûte MSc on Tuesday, 2 May 2023 at 12:00 – 13:00 (Leiden time).
Since 2017, a fieldwork and research project is being carried out in Theban Tomb 45 (Luxor, Egypt), under the direction of Carina van den Hoven. Theban Tomb 45 dates to ca. 1400 BCE and is situated in the Theban necropolis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site close to modern Luxor. Theban Tomb 45 is a fascinating case of tomb reuse: the tomb was built and partially decorated with painted scenes and texts around 1400 BCE for a man named Djehuty and his family. Several hundred years later, the tomb was reused by a man named Djehutyemheb and his family. Even though the practice of tomb reuse may call to mind images of usurpation, tomb robbery and destruction, Theban Tomb 45 was reused with consideration for the memory of the original tomb owners. Instead of replacing the original decoration with his own, the second tomb owner left most of the existing decoration in its original state. He added his own decoration to walls sections that had been left undecorated by the first tomb owner, and he retouched and repainted a number of the original paintings.
In 2019, Van den Hoven received a grant from the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities in order to develop a proof of concept on the digital documentation and material analysis of the painted decoration of the tomb, with a special focus on the ancient repaintings. This talk presents the proof of concept that is being developed for Theban Tomb 45, which includes the testing and application of various non-invasive (digital) technologies to the documentation and analysis of ancient material culture, including photogrammetry, 3D modelling, digital epigraphy, infrared photography, etc. The focus of this talk will be on the results of the most recent fieldwork season in November-December 2022: we will present the various methods and technologies that were used to digitally map the tomb in 3D using low-cost equipment, and we will show how the resulting 3D model was geo-referenced in a global coordinate system using technology that the team developed especially for this purpose.
Carina van den Hoven (The Netherlands Institute for the Near East, Leiden University)
Robert Voûte (Delft University of Technology)
Weblink: https://stichtingael.nl/
Location: Livestream via Kaltura Live Rooms. Carina van den Hoven will be presenting from Egypt, and Robert Voûte from Delft.
To Register: Please email: lucdh@hum.leidenuniv.nl