Back to Home  

Survey of a colossus.

Welcome to the Luxor Dairies

INSIGHT Expedition to Thebes, Egypt,
November, 2000

Team members:  Kevin Cain, Philippe Martinez, Mark Mudge, Jerald Munn, Carla Shroer.

October 31, 2000

(Kevin)
The giant storms rolling through Europe yesterday delayed Philippe in Paris and myself in London—but with luck the team will be together in Egypt within 24 hours. I did manage to arrive in Cairo early this morning, happily making a morning appointment with Dr. Deiter Arnold at Dahshur, at the edge of the cultivated area outlying the city.

Dr. Arnold's excavations at Dahshur are in their fifth season, and many projects are being pursued simultaneously. To date, one project has generated some 19,000+ fragments of stone relief. My goal in visiting his site was to establish the resolution needed to effectively record these pieces with laser scanning. Dr. Arnold and team Egyptologist Nathalie Walschaerts (also a Theban Mapping Project team member) were kind enough to help me survey some of the larger fragments stored at the site.

As expected, the areas of lowest relief were easily sub-millimeter in depth—a good challenge for any scanner. As with other projects, any work at Dahshur would have to suit the final output required; we spent some time thinking about how a visual database of fragments should be designed to complement the existing site records. Dr. Arnold was also interested in applying laser scanning to a small burial chamber that his team had unearthed in the previous week. This room, approx. 5 meters square, includes an intricate corbeled ceiling that would benefit from 3D documentation.
 
INSIGHT team member Dr. Philippe Martinez
(left) discusses the colossus fragments with
CNRS Director for Thebes-West, Dr. Christian
Leblanc (right).  Around them lay hundreds
of red Aswan granite fragments from a colossal
statue of the pharoah Ramsses II. 

November 1, 2000

(Kevin)
Philippe and I reached Luxor this morning, and within minutes of landing we were at the site of the Ramesseum (seen at right) to begin planning scan viewpoints of the Colossus. After being warmly received by Christian Leblanc, Director of the CNRS Mission in Luxor, we got started on the tricky business of planning our work.

Our ultimate goal is to digitally reconstruct the Colossus (seen at the far end of the hypostyle hall at right) from the extant fragments, so obvious care has to be taken to get as much information from each piece as possible. Since all fragments rest on the ground, and some occult the view of others, getting unobstructed views to scan from will be a challenge. With the help of Christian's team, we hope to move several pieces in order to facilitate scanning and spent part of the day trying to choreograph which pieces will be moved and when.

We also began to photograph the pieces and reconcile the photos with Philippe's past images and existing ground plans. We hope to have these views posted to this diary in the next day. With tomorrow's arrival of Jerry, the third member of our team, we'll be ready to start performing scanning tests.
 

  


 Looking down the central axis of the Ramesseum, towards the collapsed colossus.
November 2-3, 2000

(Kevin, with Philippe & Jerry)
At our last posting, Philippe was found but Jerry was lost, along with all of our laser scanning equipment. On Thursday, Jerry and the scanner appeared within hours of each other—very good news, indeed! And much needed after wasting nearly an entire day watching German tourists pour out of Luxor International in the hope that Jerry would miraculously appear among them.

Thursday also brought excellent news from Christian Leblanc, head of the French Mission in Luxor. After a battery of last-minute meetings, he'd managed to secure our final permission to work on the site of the Colossus. With permissions, our main crew, and our equipment, things were looking up for the first time since setting foot in Cairo four days earlier.


Another view of the colossus, with statues of
Ramsses II as Osiris in the foreground.
Note the scaffolding being put in
place for our laser scans.
 


But the jubilation didn't last long. Once we had the scanning gear back at our hotel and began to run diagnostics, we realized we had a serious problem with the control computer. Just as things were set to begin, we were back to zero.

At this writing, we're waiting to cross the Nile into Luxor proper in search of replacement computer parts. Insh'allah, our next communiqué will bear good news and pictures of us working away, at last!
 
An overview of the site of the site,
including what was once the base
of the collosus, and many fragments.
 
November 4, 2000

(Kevin)
Those following yesterday's post will remember the cliffhanger ending: our small team had fanned out over Luxor, hunting for a computer to replace the one that had chosen a poor time to stop working. Computers are still uncommon in Luxor, but we did find an affable man willing to rent his Pentium III home computer to us for the staggering sum of 450 Egyptian Pounds per day. We turned him down, but luckily found an Internet café willing to rent a machine to us for a week on better terms. We rushed the machine back to our makeshift lab at the hotel, and within an hour Jerry had transferred the proprietary cards out of the broken Mensi computer into our new host. It worked. But now that the computer was functioning, it revealed another technical difficulty. The scanner itself was misbehaving after its transcontinental voyage.  More testing managed to resolve that last problem—and, finally, we were ready to scan in the field...
 
A scan test, using umbrellas to block light spill
in the fierce Egyptian sun.
Early this morning, we met again with Christian Leblanc at the site. We solved a few practical details, including power supply and security arrangements for evening scanning. The French Mission's Egyptian workmen started to erect the first scaffolding around the Colossus almost immediately. Next we scoured the markets for the inevitable list of last-minute items. We bought a voltage stabilizer to protect our gear from the fluctuations of on-site power, and found ropes and padding in a stall selling fenugreek and saffron. After our race through the souk, we hurried back to Ramesseum to start test scans.

 
Jerry placing reference spheres on the colossus in preparation for laser scanning.
 
November 7-8, 2000

(Kevin)
Mark and Carla, the last members of our team, arrived the evening of the 6th—direct from St. Petersburg. While the time zone adjustment was easy for them, jumping from Russia to Egypt did cause a little culture shock! Even so, they hit the ground running and we're very happy to have them here.

With Mark and Carla here, we began to plan a test scan project near Medinet Habu. This scanning will be done with a "structured light" approach that Mark has been researching for some time.
More reference spheres--the red balls
seen in front of Jerry.
 

In the next days we hope to collect structured light data that we can then develop back in the U.S. Philippe and I are particularly excited about this approach since it's very cheap compared to the high-end scanner we brought for our work at the Colossus. With a cheaper scanner, we're sure more archaeological teams will be able to use these techniques. On the 7th, the whole team made a preliminary presentation of our scanning work at the Colossus to Dr. Kent Weeks, well-known for his recent publication of KV5. Dr. Weeks, one of the rare Egyptologists already aware of and interested in laser scanning, has led the Theban Mapping Project for many years. Given his background, we were eager to find out what kinds of work he thinks is appropriate for laser scanning—and understand his approach to documentation.
The view from our highest scanning perch,
provided through the hard work of Dr. Leblanc's
dedicated Egyptian crew.
 
Today (Nov. 8), Jerry leaves for the U.S., so before long we'll cross the Nile to the airport together to see him off. Before leaving, we put together several image views of our test scans at the Colossus. At right are two viewpoints showing the lower left side of the Colossus.


 

 
A scan of part of the largest frament of the Colossus. This viewpoint contains approx. 80,000 individual 3D points, taken at approx. 6mm resolution
.
A new scan, 3m from the view above
This separate viewpoint contains approx.
90,000 points, at a resolution of 8mm.

 
Another view, showing sculptural details
from the above scan.
November 9-10

(Kevin)
As the project has been wrapping up these last two days, we've used the time to present our work to interested archaeologists in the area. Happily, we had the chance to follow up our earlier meeting with Dr. Weeks, discussing recording challenges for the Theban Mapping Project. Their team hopes to use laser scanning as a way of documenting tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and we see this as a very interesting application indeed!

Yesterday, we met Dr. Ray Johnson's team at Chicago House, the famed epigraphic survey arm of the University of Chicago. At their very kind invitation, today we ventured into a closed building at Medinet Habu to see firsthand the kind of work Chicago House is engaged in. After more than 60 seasons of continuous work in Thebes, Chicago House is renowned as something of a gold standard for traditional epigraphic drawing. However, the rising water table in Thebes has caused serious damage to some of the inscriptions Chicago House hopes to record. Important carvings are being lost before they can be documented—a situation that we hope to help by scanning the material before it disintegrates. Having learned some time ago that they were beginning to consider various digital approaches to this work, we were eager to listen, suggest, argue, and learn.

When we return to the Colossus, we'll have plenty of other pieces to scan, including two medium-sized fragments of the Colossus' feet.
 
 


Posing with massive feet, in situ.
As I write this, we're packing for the return to Cairo, and then home. Our team, pictured below from left to right, are:  Carla Shroer, Mark Mudge, Sayed Mohammad, Philippe Martinez, Jerald Munn, and Kevin Cain

Thanks for following our informal entries from the field, and please don't hesitate to write in with any comments—my address is kevin@insightdigital.org.

All the best,

- Kevin Cain

 
Our crew, in front of the Amenophis Hotel
on the West Bank of the Nile.

 

View related topics:

Email this page to a friend.

Post your comments on the message board.

 (c) 2002 Institute for Study and Integration of Graphical Heritage Techniques (INSIGHT)
For problems or questions regarding this web contact the webmaster.
Last updated: 12/12/02.