One evening during the final week of the Ashmolean’s ‘Discovering Tutankhamun’ exhibition, a group of 40 or so people flocked to the museum’s basement lecture theatre to witness the fantastically exciting results of a combination of archaeology, art, and modern technology.
Adam Lowe, the director and founder of Factum Arte – a Spanish-based company that specializes in ‘digital conservation’ – presented an hour-long discussion of the work he and his team have recently completed in Egypt. Due to the precarious condition of the tomb of Tutankhamun after decades of visits from eager tourists, Factum Arte endeavoured to document the tomb carefully and replicate it exactly, as the team has done with other tombs.
With remarkable ease and clarity, Lowe explained to a room full of people who (presumably!) had very little knowledge of the technology involved, how exactly his team went about creating an exact replica of Tut’s tomb. The room remained cloaked in an amazed silence as Lowe explained and illustrated how the use of laser scanning, white light scanning, high definition photography, an enormous horizontal printer, and an artist’s eye, allowed not only for a recreation of the images and colours of the tomb paintings, but also for a wall that had the same textures, grooves, chips, and imperfections as the real tomb itself.
The result is an exact copy of the tomb as it appeared when scanning was complete. It now stands at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings, receiving 20% of the traffic that makes its way to the valley itself. Lowe hopes that more facsimiles will be produced here; Factum Arte’s next step is to train Egyptian conservators, so that they too can build these beautiful copies, perhaps allowing for the closure and protection of the tombs currently open to the public, without a great loss to tourism in the area.
Lowe’s project was absolutely wonderful, and the passion in his delivery of his work was captivating. In a time when human use and political unrest pose threats to the cultural heritage of Egypt and many other countries, it is a great comfort to see how developments in technology can be used to protect these treasures without compromising our enjoyment or understanding of them.
The evening finished with a glass of wine and a quiet stroll through the Tutankhamun exhibit. Walking past displays of drawings, journal entries, and photos of Howard Carter (the discoverer of the tomb), as well as bits and pieces of pop-culture responses to the “Tutmania” that had taken the world by storm in the 1920s, was a most fitting end to the night.
– Leah Bernardo-Ciddio
Ertegun House 