1 Introduction
Memphis was one of the most illustrious and cosmopolitan metropolises of the ancient world. Strategically located at the vertex of the Nile delta, it served as the capital of Egypt throughout almost the entire length of the Old Kingdom, from the Third Dynasty (ca. 2686 BCE) to the end of the Eighth (ca. 2160 BCE). Its lifespan ranged from the beginning of the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE, making it one of the most long-lived cities of the world.1 Despite this long history of uninterrupted habitation, Memphis has almost completely disappeared, leaving the impressive background scenery of the pyramids as the only evidence of its past grandeur.
Most of the information we know about the city topography comes from the classical sources that described Memphis both intentionally and accidentally. These sources include Greek historians and geographers—such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Diodorus and Strabo to name but a few—who captured a vivid picture of the city as it looked in the Late and Greco-Roman Periods. Among the Egyptian sources, the Memphite Theology is a particularly intriguing religious text because it describes places that so far were considered related to the mythological Egyptian imaginary but that, ultimately, may reflect real locations in Memphis. In fact, many temple and place names abound with topographical references. As an example, the name of the temple of “Ptah who is South of His Wall” provides a possible indication about its location in reference to the fort of the White Wall, of which the god Ptah was the lord.2 Other Memphite temples, such as “Neith North of the Wall” or “Khnum in front of His Wall” also seem to revolve around this important structure which clearly represented a pivot in the sacred topography of this ancient holy city. It is however necessary to notice that many toponyms have lost their original etymological meaning over the centuries and millennia, outliving the original structures from which they took their name.3
Collating pieces of spatial information from textual sources, such as those mentioned above, and confronting them with the archaeological layout as well as the geomorphology of the site, a consistent cityscape image resurfaces from the past. Lake Acherusia, the Abaton of Osiris, the fort of the White Wall and the temple of Ptah “South of His Wall” may eventually find their places in a sort of predictive map intended to revive old debates as well as raise new research questions. In short, what we aim at in this project is a way to produce a text-augmented topographical map of the city capable to take into account all those philological clues that would not fit in a conventional archaeological map.
We present our work-in-progress Virtual Reality (VR) experience, first released for the Oculus Go VR headset, and now ported to work with its successor, the Oculus Quest. Our VR experience combines 3D landscape overviews, linked 2D detail maps, hypothetical schematic models of key Memphite sites, and within those sites, hotspots that lead the user to excerpts from the original source texts. We will discuss our motivations, design choices, and suggestions on how these types of experiences can be improved.
2 Historical Sources: Myths vs Facts
When it comes to drawing information from classical sources—and notoriously from Herodotus’s histories—we have to face the problem of their reliability.4 Most of the stories recorded by these ancient Greek authors took place millennia earlier and were reported only by hearsay. This is when the narrative becomes extremely flawed and needs more interpretation. Any attempt to assimilate Egyptian deities, characters, and anecdotes to the Greek mythology—perhaps to make them more familiar to their audience—resulted in a soundalike confusion that prevents scholars from identifying any historical basis. The fact remains that their autoptic descriptions are still highly valuable, at least for the comprehension of the contemporaneous historical and geographical context.
2.1 The Foundation of Memphis
The Late Period of Egypt is also when classical historians came in contact with the indigenous Egyptian culture. The account of the foundation of Memphis as narrated by Herodotus5 (ca. 450 BCE) has long been considered a fabulous legend mainly because the hydraulic engineering works described by the historians were deemed anachronistic for that period:6
Of Min (Menes), who first became king of Egypt, the priests said that on the one hand he banked off the site of Memphis from the river: for the whole stream of the river used to flow along by the sandy mountain range on the side of Libya, but Min formed by embankments that bend of the river which lies to the south about a hundred furlongs above Memphis, and thus he dried up the old stream and conducted the river so that it flowed in the middle between the mountains (the Libyan and Mokattam heights): and even now this bend of the Nile is by the Persians kept under very careful watch, that it may flow in the channel to which it is confined, and the bank is repaired every year; for if the river should break through and overflow in this direction, Memphis would be in danger of being overwhelmed by flood.7 When this Min, who first became king, had made into dry land the part which was dammed off, on the one hand, I say, he founded in it that city which is now called Memphis; for Memphis too is in the narrow part of Egypt; and outside the city he dug round it on the north and west a lake communicating with the river, for the side towards the east is barred by the Nile itself. Then secondly, he established in the city the temple of Hephaistos (Ptah) a great work and most worthy of mention.
Diodorus’s idyllic description of lake Acherusia8 near Memphis still matches the picture of Dahshur seasonal lake (fig. 4.7), possibly the southernmost surviving part of this ancient, swampy body of water:
and “Meadows,” the mythical dwelling of the dead, is his term for the place near the lake which is called Acherousia, which is near Memphis, and around it are fairest meadows, of a marsh-land and lotus and reeds. The same explanation also serves for the statement that the dwelling of the dead is in these regions, since the most and the largest tombs of the Egyptians are situated there, the dead being ferried across both the river and Lake Acherousia and their bodies laid in the vaults situated there.
These descriptions are consistent with the picture of a countryside shaped by traditional irrigation earthworks that characterized the Nilotic landscape in the past. The fundamental role of the basin irrigation techniques has been documented since the most ancient eras of Egyptian history.9 The tradition about Menes’s foundation of the city by diverting the course of the Nile seems to reflect a local legend originated from the presence of large irrigation earthworks still visible at the time of Herodotus’s visit. The existence of seasonally flooded reservoirs and drainage canals, variously called ḥawḍ, birka, buḥayra, baḥr in Arabic toponymy, can be mapped in historical cartography (fig. 4.2). In addition, traces of winding earth dykes crossing the Nile valley east to west can still be found in the Egyptian countryside from the observation of aerial and satellite imagery.10
Different studies attempted to reconstruct the Memphite land- and waterscapes based on classical accounts. Among the first, Rennell11 already surmised the presence of a Nile paleo-channel in the lowland at the foothill of Saqqara plateau. In 1982, the Egypt Exploration Society started the Survey of Memphis aiming to contextualize previous explorations into the broader domain of landscape archaeology.12 The initial results of geological investigations and the scarcity of archaeological evidence prior to the Middle Kingdom in the site of Memphis led to the conclusion that the original settlement was to be sought in the strip of cultivated land close to the elite tombs of Saqqara. Based on these considerations, the investigators hypothesized the transfer of the Memphite toponymy from theoretical structures of the Early Dynastic Period located further west, to the present location following the natural shift of the Nile towards East.13
2.2 The Abaton of Osiris
Strabo’s description of Memphis, visited around 25 BCE, greatly differs from Herodotus’ and Diodorus’ in being more concise and focused on the topography of the city rather than on history. An interesting excerpt from his description can be confidently related to the citadel of Kom Tuman in the northern part of Memphis:14
There are lakes situated in front of the city and the palaces, which latter, though now in ruins and deserted, are situated on a height and extend down to the ground of the city below; and adjoining the city are a grove and a lake.
Here, the imposing substructures of the pharaoh Apries’s palace still stand today above the once seasonally flooded lowlands stretching between the city and the western desert plateau. The grove with a lake near the citadel may have been the location of another important religious site, the already mentioned Abaton of Osiris:15
In Memphis, however, they say, the Apis (bull) is kept, being the image of the soul of Osiris, whose body also lies there. The name of this city some interpret as “the haven of the good” and others as meaning properly the “tomb of Osiris.” They also say that the sacred island in front of the gates (sic)16 at all other times is untrodden by man and quite unapproachable, and even birds do not alight on it nor fishes approach it; yet, at one special time, the priests cross over to it, and perform the sacrificial rites for the dead, and lay wreaths upon the tomb, which lies in the encompassing shade of a persea-tree, which surpasses in height any olive.
Diodorus also refers to an island placed in front of the city:17
On one of the islands off Memphis there stands even to this day a temple of Daedalus, which is honored by the people of that region.
The Greeks used to identify foreign deities with theirs on the basis of common divine attributes or rather on the assonance of their names. Daedalus here seems to evoke the archaic Memphite god Tatenen,18 ruler of the forces of the subsoil. Its name literally means “Risen Land” and is the deification of the primordial mound of earth that, according to the Egyptian creation myths, emerged from the Waters of Chaos as the very first entity of the universe. The Memphite Theology establishes Ptah as the creator of the universe and Memphis as the location where the unification of Egypt took place.19 The version of this creation myth written on the Shabako stone—a stela originally erected in the great temple of Ptah in Memphis by Shabako (dynasty 25)—narrates about a royal fortress in Memphis the city of Ptah-Tatenen:
| Line 13: |
(…) Tatenen, South-of-His-Wall, Lord of Eternity. |
| Line 17: |
This is the land ////// the burial of Osiris in the House of Sokar. |
| Line 61: |
(…) The Granary [sic] of Tatenen is the Great Throne that gives joy to the heart of the gods in the House of Ptah. |
| Line 62: |
(…) owing to the fact that Osiris was drowned in His water. |
| Line 64: |
(…) Thus Horus came into the earth at the Royal Fortress, to the north of this land to which he had come. |
In these excerpts we can find recurrent references to important Memphite temples and palaces. Ptah’s epithet “South of His Wall” (rsj jnb=f) refers to the White Wall, the royal fortress which is located north of the land where Osiris was buried. According to line 17, this holy ground was probably located in the temple of Sokar. It is meaningful that these three gods gradually merged into a new syncretistic deity called Ptah-Sokar-Osiris whose peculiar statuettes are commonly found in most elite tombs of the Late Period. The epithet “Granary of Tatenen,” with reference to the temple of Ptah, is a hapax and has been generically interpreted in reference to the extraordinary fertility of the Memphite region.20 It is suggestive that the ideogram “granary” of Shabako stone resembles a variant of the dome-shaped hieroglyph jꜣt (
)—yet not topped by shrubs—that represents the primordial mound of earth, of which Tatenen was the embodiment. The Egyptian equivalent word for the Greek “abaton” (inaccessible place) is jꜣt wꜥbt (pure mound) or sometimes jw wꜥb (pure island). Osiris was drowned at the feet of the Great Throne of Memphis which was the Granary of Tatenen or, ideally, the Abaton island.21
A plausible location for the Abaton of Osiris and the temple of Sokar could therefore be sought between the temple of Ptah and the citadel of Kom Tuman in the north of Memphis.22 This is the place where a large sunken oval depression—now called Northern Birka—opens in the core of the ruin field. The Arabic word “birka” refers to a seasonal pond that was filled by the Nile waters during the annual flood. There are three birkas within the Memphite ruin field of which the central one is the great temple of Ptah. Indeed, these geomorphological features are not natural but the result of a gradual process of sediment and material accumulation all around an old temple enclosure. In archaeological terms, the birka is the negative of the tell formation process. Many other ancient temples stood on a lower ground than the city such as in Bubastis.23
2.3 The White Wall
As said, the first evidence recording the White Wall place name goes back to the Predynastic Period whereas the latest appears in the accounts of the Persian Wars narrated by Herodotus and Thucydides, spanning over two thousand and five hundred years of uninterrupted history. However, we do not know in which form the fort subsisted throughout this long period of time or whether only the toponym survived either as the original name of the city itself or the name of its northern quarter.24
Several archaeological clues lead to the long-debated identification of the historical White Wall with the so-called Northern Enclosure at Kom Tuman, yet still too poorly investigated to take a definitive stance on the issue. The fortress contained a royal palace of pharaoh Apries (589–570 BCE) with barracks and armories. Flinders Petrie25 called this area “Military Camp” after finding considerable amounts of bronze armor scales of Persian workmanship.26 A clear insight into this archaeological scenario comes from Thucydides’s narration of the siege of the White Wall led by the Athenian troops during the rebellion of Inaros:27
Abandoning a Cyprian expedition upon which they happened to be engaged with two hundred ships of their own and their allies, they (the Athenians) arrived in Egypt and sailed from the sea into the Nile, and making themselves masters of the river and two-thirds of Memphis, addressed themselves to the attack of the remaining third, which is called White Wall (
Λευκὸν Τεῖχος ).
Here, inside this fortress, the Persians established their headquarter in Egypt. The illuminating statement of the White Wall being one third of the entire city also matches the present topography of the site. Three large rectangular enclosures of almost equal size line up north to south all the way across Memphis ruin field. These are the Northern Enclosure at Kom Tuman, the great temple of Ptah in the Central Birka, and a third unexplored enclosure located in the Southern Birka that Herodotus credits to a certain king Proteus.28 An interesting scholium (comment) tries to elucidate this sentence of Thucydides:29
They say that Memphis had three walls. Since therefore two had already been taken, the battle took place in front of the third one. It was called White because while the others were built of bricks, that one was made of marble.
More realistically, the White Wall was originally a white-plastered mudbrick fortification (infra), hence its name. It follows that it must have been rebuilt or restored several times over the centuries.30
The nature of the Memphite place name “White Wall” caused a sort of long-lasting debate among scholars. The uncertainties related to this toponym are largely due to its use in reference to the original fort, the whole city and the Memphite nomos (district). The symbolic nature of the White Wall as a landscape feature has also been proposed by some scholars.31 Recently, the hypothesis of the White Wall location at Kom Tuman regained momentum after the excavation led by the Russian Academy of Sciences.32
According to the Egyptian textual sources, the fort was a royal palace, a military stronghold, and a sacred ceremonial complex for the celebration of the royal jubilee (Sed-festival) at the same time. Different excerpts from Papyrus Harris concerning the first jubilee of Ramses III (dynasty 20) in Memphis, provide an insight into the role of this royal venue:33
I celebrated for thee the first jubilee of my reign, as a very great feast of Tatenen.
The gods of South and North were gathered in the midst of it (the court). I restored thy temple, the jubilee-houses which were before in ruins, since the (former) kings.
At the foot of Apries’s palace terrace, Petrie found the fragments of a monumental gate decorated with exquisite carved scenes of a king’s jubilee whose name in the cartouches was left blank. Relying on stylistic arguments only, he dated the jubilee portal to the Old Kingdom. Today, the beautiful reliefs have been attributed to the Saite Period, perfectly framed within the context of the archaizing style of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty.34
Several settings of the Sed-festival, such as the shrines of the gods or the Run Around the Wall, are found already in the burial complex of Netjerikhet (Djoser), founder of the Third Dynasty (ca. 2686–2613 BCE). The Northern Enclosure in Memphis shares many formal and functional analogies with Djoser’s pyramid complex: its size, orientation and asymmetrical distribution of the doors along the perimeter are in fact comparable.35 Inside, there must have been those originally wooden pavilions (Jubilee Houses) which in Djoser’s tomb served only as a scenic backdrop and façade (i.e. Potemkin architecture), whose function was to reproduce the king’s jubilee event ad perpetuum. Here we are faced with life size “statues of buildings” whose purpose was to provide an eternal substitute in limestone for the royal palace and pavilions built in perishable materials, just as the statues were of individuals. The repeating motif of the enclosure wall is interrupted by 14 false gates and an actual entrance to the complex located in the southeast corner of the enclosure. The characteristic pattern with recesses and overhangs adorned with flat undecorated niches, the square notches (loopholes?) placed in the upper part of the wall, and the precise asymmetrical arrangement of the doors (five of which along the east side) make this iconography a distinctive mark of a specific enclosure wall. The same identical motif, featured for first time in Djoser and Sekhemkhet funerary enclosures, also recurs as a bottom frieze in some royal and private sarcophagi of the Middle Kingdom36 as well as in some bases of statues and shrines.37 The different contexts and periods to which these objects belong indicate that they refer to a common archetype that can be found in the original White Wall complex of Memphis.38 In this perspective, Third Dynasty royal tombs in Saqqara would parallel the Memphite fort in the same way as the Early Dynastic funerary enclosures (Talbezirke) at Abydos and Hierakonpolis closely reflect the urban palace complex of Hierakonpolis in its layout and wall decoration.39
2.4 The Temple of Ptah
The great temple of Ptah “South of His Wall” in Memphis is the best-known monument of the ancient city. It was one of the greatest national sanctuaries of Egypt together with the temple of Re in Heliopolis and Amun in Thebes. Unfortunately, very few vestiges remain of the temple of Ptah. The ancient Greek sources describe in detail its four main pylons (monumental gates) oriented towards the cardinal points:
Eastern Pylon:40 After Mycerinus, said the priests, Asychis became king of Egypt. He built the eastern propylaea of Hephaestus’ temple; this is by much the fairest and largest of all, for while all have carved figures and innumerable graces of architecture, this court has far more than any.
Northern Pylon:41 This Moeris was remembered as having built the northern propylaea of the temple of Hephaestus, and dug a lake, of as many furlongs in circuit as I shall later show; and built there pyramids also, the size of which I will mention when I speak of the lake.
Western Pylon:42 The next to reign after Proteus (they said) was Rhampsinitus. The memorial of his name left by him was the western propylaea of the temple of Hephaestus; before this he set two statues of twenty-five cubits height; the northernmost of these is called by the Egyptians Summer, and the southernmost Winter; that one which they call Summer they worship and entreat well, but do contrariwise to the statue called Winter.
Southern Pylon:43 Having made himself master of all Egypt, Psammetichus made the southern propylaea of Hephaestus’ temple at Memphis, and built over against this a court for Apis, where Apis is kept and fed whenever he appears; this court has an inner colonnade all round it and many carved figures; the roof is held up by great statues twelve cubits high for pillars. Apis is in the Greek language Epaphus.
Sesostris Colossi:44 Sesostris was the only Egyptian king who also ruled Ethiopia. To commemorate his name, he set before the temple of Hephaestus two stone statues of himself and his wife, each thirty cubits high, and statues of his four sons, each of twenty cubits.
Amasis Colossus:45 Moreover Amasis dedicated, besides monuments of marvelous size in all the other temples of note, the huge image that lies supine before Hephaestus’ temple at Memphis; this image is seventy-five feet in length; there stand on the same base, on either side of the great image, two huge statues hewn from the same block, each of them twenty feet high. There is at Sais another stone figure of like bigness, lying as lies the figure at Memphis.
Little is known about the vast interior of the temple enclosure with the sole exception of the court of Apis (supra) and, possibly, the western hypostyle hall described by Strabo.46
∵
Many other pieces of textual evidence concur in completing the urban picture of Memphis. The topographical questions that have arisen so far, are ones of great historical significance for the city and Egypt, with relevant implications for the comprehension of the settlement development in relation to the environmental changes that occurred over the millennia.
3 VR Experience: Conceptual Design
Moving beyond an evocative reconstruction based on historians’ accounts, an attempt was made to extrapolate and arrange in a spatial scheme all the pieces of topographic information about Memphis that we were able to find in the textual content. These ancient topographies (written descriptions) provide a consistent picture of the late city but, differently than an actual map, are lacking in precision. We know, as an example, that a building was located south of another one or within a given district of the city. Nonetheless, this kind of information is not sufficient to draw a pinpoint map of Memphis but can still be used to establish spatial relations between individual structures in a quite flexible arrangement.
The result of this work is a schematic map (fig. 4.1) made of rectangular shapes and not-to-scale pictures that act as placemark icons for the topographic clues emerging from the interpretation of the above-mentioned literary excerpts. In other words, it is a compromise between an abstract description and a realistic representation. Different kinds of schematic maps have already been used for the topographical reconstruction of sites largely unknown from an archaeological point of view. For instance, K.A. Kitchen proposed a conjectural map of New-Kingdom Memphis mainly based on Egyptian and later classical sources.47 In our intentions the map would act as a bridge between textual and ground-based evidence.
The next step was to compare the schematic map with the known archaeological evidence. Although largely sketchy, the archaeological layout of Memphis provides some anchors for the geolocation of the schematic map, such as the great enclosure of Ptah, which was brought to light by Petrie in the early twentieth century. Another fundamental source of information for the city topography is an administrative document from Zenon archive, papyrus PSI 5.488,48 that lists south to north all the sections of Memphis defensive embankments that were built against the floods. Their names and measures provide relevant information about the location of the urban districts within the city. The sequence of the sections can be hooked to the ground at the “Quay of Ptah” located along the east-west axis of the temple.
The scale of the city can be fixed considering the morphology of the site. The edge of the Memphite ruin field, neatly traceable on satellite imagery and elevation maps, consists in a wide formation of elevated ground that rises up to 20 m above the countryside level. This compact ground is the result of an artificial process of accumulation of mud bricks and other anthropic refuse on the same site over thousands of years. The arched and rounded profile of the eastern side reveals the ancient river front of the Nile while, on the western side, it appears more jagged. The three already mentioned oval depressions (birkas) open along the north south axis across the site providing additional spatial constraints for the geolocation of the map.
Figure 4.1
Schematic map of Memphis based on textual sources
Figure 4.2
Map of the Memphite region based on historical cartography
Figure 4.3
Anaglyph image combining forward and aft images taken by KH-7 camera of Corona satellite on 23/01/1966. Images have been overlapped and given complementary colors to be viewed with 3D red/cyan glasses (see figs. 4.4–4.7).
Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey
Declassified Corona satellite imagery (1960–1972) is particularly valuable in archaeology since it preserves a picture of the Near Eastern landscape still largely spared by rural modernization and urbanization.49 Moreover, most of the photos come in stereopairs suitable for observation through a stereoscope. Thanks to the heightened vertical exaggeration that characterizes Corona stereo camera systems, it is possible to detect slight depressions and bumps in the ground over a regional scale by exploiting depth perception in human vision. Anaglyph images of Memphis (figs. 4.3–4.7) are a precious source of topographic information especially considering that, after the completion of the Aswan dam, the site underwent a rapid urban sprawl. The historical village of Mit Rahina (fig. 4.4) appears still confined within the original boundary of its kōm, one of the many raised villages that were the only dry ground in the valley during the inundation period. Corona satellite imagery is also suitable to be viewed in a stereoscopic display and will be shown in our application (infra).
Figure 4.4
Clipped anaglyph image showing the Memphite ruin field and the village of Mit Rahina
Figure 4.5
Clipped anaglyph image showing Saqqara North and the Step Pyramid complex
As a result of this work, we were able to elaborate a new topographic reconstruction of the late city based on archaeological evidence but enriched with additional information extrapolated from textual sources (fig. 4.8). Many unexplored areas of the site are now shown in a different light that provides valuable information on their archaeological potential. In order to test and communicate this hypothesis, we are creating a tool capable to visualize the spatial content both as a map and an immersive 3D environment. Digital models are made of simple geometric solids to provide schematic representations of the principal city landmarks. By selecting one of these interactive models on the map we can visualize the excerpts of the textual sources that underlie their alleged location in each area of the site shown in a Mapbox viewer. (figs. 4.9–4.10).
Figure 4.6
Clipped anaglyph image showing Saqqara South and Shepseskaf’s mastaba tomb
Figure 4.7
Clipped anaglyph image showing Dahshur with the pyramids of Snefru and Birkat al Malik Fu’ad I
Figure 4.8
Hypothetical reconstruction of the Memphite region in the Late and Greco-Roman Period
Figure 4.9
Memphis App as viewed in Oculus Go portable VR display system. General overview of the Memphite Region with hotspots on the main sites
Figure 4.10
Memphis App as viewed in Oculus Go portable VR display system. Schematic model of the temple of Ptah with satellite view showing the modern area at the southern entrance of the temple. The colossi of Ramses II found here could be those described by Herodotus.
4 VR Experience: Implementation
4.1 Navigation
Trying to navigate, or perhaps more precisely engage in locomotion around a 1:1 scale virtual world is an unsolved problem in the field of Virtual Reality. Many techniques have been evaluated, with the most popular being joystick/controller (point to fly), real walking (along with walking in place and redirected walking), and the now popular teleportation. Early research showed that real walking gives the highest sense of presence (of the user being in the virtual space).50 Recent work51 has shown that walking and teleportation techniques are better in terms of presence and reduced simulator sickness. Limiting simulator sickness is important if we expect users to spend longer amounts of time immersed in our virtual experience. As an example, one recent and very well-done example is a photogrammetry capture of the Tomb of Nefertari.52 In this example they use the teleportation navigation method to allow the user to “jump” to new spots around the virtual tomb. While helping with simulator sickness, this technique has drawbacks, such as reduced spatial understanding.53 Some researchers have tried to modify the flying technique to reduce sickness54 by dynamically restricting the user’s field of view during travel. This type of technique has made its way in modern VR applications such as Google Earth VR, as well as Altspace VR (a social VR platform). We thus decide to adopt a “scholar’s studio” paradigm, in which all content is present within a small room. This allows most of the navigation to occur via the user’s own walking. This works well especially now that we are using the Oculus Quest which has position tracking (infra). With this decision to use a real-walking navigation technique, we hope to achieve good presence, good spatial understanding, and lower simulator sickness.
4.2 VR Hardware
In creating the VR application, we needed to pick which hardware device to target. Our choice was between higher end “tethered” headsets and all-in-one units. A tethered headset is attached to a high-end gaming computer,55 and allows for more detailed rendering. The all-in-one units have a built in CPU/GPU, which means that no external computer is needed. This gives advantages of being portable, unencumbered (no cables tripping you up), and often lower cost. However, the downside is that for those looking to push the bounds of photorealism, the all-in-one units are going to feel somewhat “cartoony”. We decided to go for the all-in-one unit as our goal was to be able to support as many VR users as possible. In 2018, we began work using the Oculus Go. One large limitation of this generation of the headset is that tracking for the head and a single head was rotation only. Position was not tracked, so stepping to the left or right produced an odd sensation, as the scene did not update as the brain expected it to. We have since transitioned to the successor of the Oculus Go, the Oculus Quest.
4.3 Game Engines
While there are several game engines worth considering, we felt that our existing knowledge of the Unity game engine would lower our time to implement. Additionally, Unity is known to target low-end mobile graphics, which is useful on the resource constrained all-in-one headset. If we were targeting an aesthetic that demanded more photorealism, it would make sense to evaluate using the Unreal game engine. Other possibilities involve the use of WebVR/WebXR technologies. This involves presenting the VR experience as a webpage with html and java script coding. By adding special WebXR libraries into the webpage, a button can appear that allows us to enter immersive VR mode. This technology is promising in that it makes application distribution easy. We simply send out a URL for users to point their browsers to. This would allow us to bypass “walled garden” app stores, for which acceptance of this kind of academic app is not guaranteed. While in our testing, there was a loss in performance (with peaks below the threshold of 45 frame rate per second) between a compiled Unity application and a browser based WebXR experience, the distribution methods that WebXR are too good to ignore, and we are still evaluating its usage for future applications. Finally, we could consider using some of the VR tools/addons to the popular commercial GIS products. However, we found that while they have some useful pre-made interactions, we desired the interaction design flexibility that comes with using a fully featured, scriptable game engine.
4.4 Maps
Our concept (in the above section) involved grounding everything to a real-world base map. We thought about importing terrain, but since we had not conducted on site drone photography in this area, the existing sources of the terrain and aerial photography would have to do. We decided to utilize Mapbox, which is a widely used mapping service. This is often used for 2D mobile apps, such as food delivery and ride sharing. However, they do provide a 3D terrain mode. Mapbox provides a Unity SDK, which is a library that interfaces to their web API. This allows us to specify a lat/lon coordinate and a zoom level, and then Mapbox does the work of pulling down the needed tiles of terrain (geometry) and aerial photographs (the textures). We can also load GIS shapefiles into the Mapbox web portal, which can then be pulled down into our application. Utilizing Mapbox gave us a quick start by easily providing the needed basemap and zoomed in views. We can also easily switch views to anywhere on the planet, which could be useful if the application expands into other areas of Egypt.
4.5 Content vs Application
When making a Unity VR application the first tendency seems to be to have all the content inside the application. This means every change—perhaps even just the wording of some text—requires the programmer to intervene and modify scripts. In our application, we made heavy use of the JSON file format to act as a sort of external database of our content. JSON is a now common web standard. Data is presented in name/value pairs and can consist of hierarchical/nested lists. By keeping our content out of the application, this means we can work on the application and content separately. We can also submit the JSON files for independent review, where even non computer expert scholars could read the content and look for any errors. Finally, we could host the JSON files on a server, and pull down the data on startup. This strategy would allow us to update content, or even add new sites of interest, without forcing the user to download a new version of the application.
5 Discussion
The contribution of classical authors in understanding the past is a precious source of information but needs to be interpreted and framed in the proper historical context. Recent discoveries and cross-disciplinary approaches to long debated research questions mostly seem to rehabilitate the ancient historical sources, helping modern scholars challenge some given translations and sometime arguing in favor of a more “verbatim” interpretation of the ancient texts.56
The randomness of many archaeological discoveries in Memphis did not help understand the big topographic picture. The location of the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom urban settlement in relation to the eastward shifting of the Nile and the development of the necropolis is still a matter of debate among scholars, mostly due to a lack of archaeological evidence directly attributable to these earlier phases. In general, little is known about alluvial settlements in the valley both because of the difficulty for archaeologists to operate in modern urban contexts and the general lack of comprehensive studies on the ancient Egyptian city. More recently, the emergence of settlement archaeology studies in Egyptology is steering the focus of research from the necropolises towards the lesser-known urban areas.57
Most of the textual sources refer to the Late Period and Ptolemaic Kingdom, which is also when the city experienced its apogee as a metropolis in terms of population and multi-ethnicity.58 However, many city landmarks seen and described by the Greek travelers are attributed to the earlier kings and, in particular, the temple of Ptah would date back to Menes, the first king according to the Egyptian tradition (supra). This statement is in contrast with the hypothesis of a different location for the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom city center.59 The idea of a settlement shift, although supported by some geological clues, relies on indirect archaeological assumptions such as the existence of an older enclosure of Ptah to be sought further west than the Ramesside one.60 Many of the ancient descriptions of Memphis would find more consistency if the ongoing archaeological investigations at Kom Tuman61 confirm the existence here of Early Dynastic/Old Kingdom structures which could prove that the later Northern Enclosure (Thucydides’s Leukon Teichos) rests on the remains of the original White Wall fort.
The site of Memphis shows a largely undisclosed archaeological potential since it might be still well-preserved under thick layers of alluvium. So far, excavations on the site have been hindered by many factors such as the rising of the water table, the expansion of the modern town of Mit Rahina, the rapid urbanization of the farmland but maybe also an unfounded common belief having it that Memphis, so long plundered of its stones since antiquity, has nothing else to disclose. The topographic questions so far posed can be addressed only by long-term investigations on the ground, be they archaeological or geophysical. Meanwhile, scholars have now an extraordinary opportunity to test new and old reconstructive hypotheses using the novel technologies available today.
The value of 3D models and Virtual Reality as a tool of knowledge—not just for mere edutainment—has been demonstrated in several cases. The inter-visibility between funerary monuments on the western desert plateau and the city in the valley was recently investigated by innovative studies.62 Moving further, experiencing a fully immersive vision in a “frameless” viewport, such as in a stereoscopic headset, would add more accuracy and realism to the perception of human and natural spaces in a simulated historical environment. In such a virtual laboratory, scholars would be able to test their hypotheses or, rather, find previously unseen perspectives suitable to raise new research questions.
In conclusion, this project intends to provide a virtual environment where scholars and students can visualize, validate, and share both spatial data and textual information in interactive ways and from a human-scale (stereoscopic) viewpoint. We present the complex and long debated case study of Memphis topography with the twofold aim to revive the old discussion and stimulate new ways of looking at the problem of its reconstruction. According to the principles of cyber-archaeology,63 we do not present here an imaginative and arbitrary reconstruction of Memphis, but rather an interactive non-photorealistic simulation of the Memphite urban environment that allows the observer to contemplate in a single glance the complex and varied sources of data that concur in outlining a potential topography of the city in the Late and Greco-Roman Periods. Thanks to the JSON open format (supra), we intend to keep our application open to external contributions and revisions without the need to rebuild and release it with each change.
6 Future Directions
The VR application presented here is still a work in progress, and we therefore have many ideas on how the experience could be expanded. Here we will detail several ideas.
Change over time. At the moment we present static views of both the landscape and the schematic maps. One technique that other research projects have utilized is to give the user a timeline slider to manipulate.64 This would add the possibility to broaden the timeframe to previous periods of the city history by showing/hiding topographical features whose coexistence would be anachronistic.
6.1 Corona Satellite Imagery Integration and Landscape Reconstruction.
As we mentioned above, Corona satellite stereo imagery focusing on the Memphite region is a precious source of information about the landscape. Moreover, it can be easily viewed in an Oculus Quest display. We intend to broaden the horizon of the research from the city boundaries to the surrounding region to better investigate the visual and spatial relationships between some funerary monuments located on the desert edge and the main city points of interest. For instance, Lepsius’s map of Memphis65 shows an interesting panoramic diagram showing the pyramid silhouettes as seen from Kom Tuman palace mound, a location which seems to act as a privileged point of view overlooking the necropolis.66
6.2 Application Distribution
When we first started working with the Oculus Go, the Oculus app store seemed more open to accepting different types of content. This is important because getting content onto these all-in-one units can be challenging. However, with the release of the Oculus Quest they detailed in a blog post67 that they would be restricting access and accepting only well-made polished titles. This basically locks out small proof of concept / work in progress projects such as ours. Being locked out the official app store means we have to explore other ways to distribute the app. Currently Oculus has not completely locked down the headsets, thus it is possible to employ the technique of “sideloading” an application. The user can connect the headset to a desktop computer and using the right tools, can upload a non-official app to the Quest. There is even a software package to facilitate this (SideQuest). Currently sideloading is the technique we are using to load our application onto Quests in our lab. Other options will be discussed below.
6.3 Social VR
One big problem with our application is that it is still a single user experience. Much of time is humorously (or perhaps frustratingly) asking “what do you see? Are you seeing the map?” only to find out the user has pressed the wrong buttons and is staring at one of the Oculus menu screens. Now that headsets (especially the all-in-one units) are cheap enough to purchase multiple units, we look towards the paradigm where a group, perhaps the instructor and some students, can visit the experience together. Each user seeing the avatar representation of each other in the space, being able to gesture and point at objects, and even if separated by continents, able to use voice chat to communicate. These visions are not some sci-fi future, but they are the situations we are currently (as of 2020) evaluating in this new paradigm of “Social VR”.
The quickly evolving landscape of Social VR would need a full article unto itself, given the quickly evolving number of platforms (at our current count over 20!), which is likely to leave this section looking out of date in the near-future. Still, we will discuss what we have been exploring. One idea we have explored is adding a library to our existing Unity app that will help facilitate multi-user / Social VR. Specifically, we have been looking at the “normcore” networking library. Our initial tests are promising, but one problem is that any app we create will be still left with the distribution issues mentioned above.
We have also been exploring the now Microsoft backed “AltspaceVR” platform. This free service provides rooms that support up to 70 participants along with a robust events system. All major headsets are supported, and there is also a Windows PC desktop client for those lacking a headset. We have so far attended academic talks and musical performances. AltspaceVR is an official app in the Oculus app store, so no sideloading is required. For making our own experiences, there is a process available to import graphical models, and even a type of scripting that allows us to create interactive objects. While we are still in the early stages, we have so far created a proof-of-concept scenario that pulls down Mapbox tiles to create a base map.
Another platform worth considering is the Mozilla backed “Hubs” platform. This is an opensource platform that provides rooms of up to 30 people. This utilizes WebXR technologies, so it runs on almost every desktop and every headset. The experience is “distributed” by sending people a link. Thus, the onboarding process is very easy, no accounts to create or complicated menuing systems to learn. We have been able to use their browser based “Spoke” editor to easily create worlds. One limitation that we are currently investigating is how to add interactable content. On the surface, there is not an easy way to add in user scripts to objects. However, since the whole project is opensource, it should theoretically be possible to add new components into a forked version of the Hubs platform. Whatever platform we utilize, we look forward to the future of being able to have talks, lectures, and meetups inside our scenarios and no longer requiring VR to be a solitary endeavor.
Abbreviations
| BAR |
J.H. Breasted (Ed.), Ancient Records of Egypt. Chicago 1906–1907. |
Its oldest name “White Wall” (jnb ḥḏ), is recorded in a rock inscription in Sinai Peninsula, showing evidence that at least a fortified citadel was already in existence at the time of the pre-dynastic king Iry Hor (Tallet and Laisney 2012).
Erichsen and Schott 1954, 315, 1.28.
Plutarch (infra) reported alternate meanings for the name “Memphis” as “Haven of the Good Ones” or “Tomb of Osiris.”. Although these translations sound close to the toponym mn nfr, it is likely that the Egyptians of the Late and Greco-Roman Period lost the memory of its original etymon relating to the pyramid complex of Pepy I (Spiegelberg 1911).
Lloyd 1995.
Hdt. II, 99. Cfr. Diod. I, 50,3–5.
“The dyking and the diversion of the Nile would have been a colossal project and had, in any case, such limited value that we are justified in doubting that it was ever carried out”. Lloyd 1976, 11.
Several documents from the Late and Greco-Roman Period record excessive Nile floods that destroyed or damaged some cross-dykes (Greek
Diod. I, 96.
Cf. the depictions on the mace head of king Scorpion (Butzer 1976, 20).
Willems et al. 2017.
Rennell 1800.
Jeffreys 1985.
Jeffreys and Tavares 1994. See also Bunbury and Jeffreys 2011; Bunbury 2020; Lourenço Gonçalves 2019.
Strab. XVII, 1,32.
Plut. De Iside, 359,20; Spiegelberg 1911.
This passage from Plutarch is quite controversial. The rough translation of the manuscript is “the islet that stands before the gates”. The critics of the text (Griffiths 1970), however, preferred to reconstruct the word
Diod. I, 97,6.
Wiedemann 1890, 402.
Breasted 1901; Erman 1911; Sethe 1928; Junker 1940; Junge 1973; and El Hawary 2010. A new analytical grammar and updated translation of the Shabaqo Stone is currently in preparation by J.A. Roberson.
Frankfort 1948, 31.
Griffiths 1980, 160–161.
A possible representation of an Abaton of Osiris could be found in the central part of the famous Nile mosaic of Palestrina where a conical building with a portal lies in the shade of a tree on an island with a grove surrounded by a wall. Meyboom 1995.
Hdt II. 59, 60.
Jeffreys 1991; Jurman 2020, vol. 1, 21–96.
Petrie 1909b.
Petrie 1909a, § II, 5–7 and pls. III–IX; Lopes and Braga 2011.
Thuc. 1.104.
Hdt. II, 112. It could be the temple of Sekhmet, consort of Ptah. In its vicinity, Herodotus places the Phoenician quarter (Tyrian Camp) whose inhabitants had built a temple of Astarte (Foreign Aphrodite), associated to Sekhmet as a goddess of war and healing.
Hude 1973.
In his Stele of Victory, Piankhi notes that the fort north of Memphis “was strong, and that the enclosure walls were raised by a new rampart”. BAR IV § 861.
Love 2003.
Belova and Ivanov 2016; Krol 2015.
BAR IV, 335–336; Leclère 2008, 53.
Kaiser 1987; Der Manuelian 1994.
Petrie 1909a, 4, § 10. For a broader discussion of Egyptian fortifications and their artistic representations see Monnier 2014, Nadali 2006, O’Connor 1989, Van Walsem 2020, De Trafford 2007.
Van Walsem 2014.
Arnold 1997, 37; Lauer 1927, 128.
“think of the White Wall of Memphis, reproduced in Djoser’s complex, which no Egyptologist has ever identified as a palace wall, simply because we find the ‘palace’ dummies inside that wall”. Van Walsem 2014, 8. For the architecture of Djoser funerary complex see Schäfer 1986, Smith and Simpson 1998.
The northern gates of Djer, Peribsen, and Khasekhemwy funerary enclosures show a striking resemblance to the gate of the Early Dynastic palace complex found at Kom el Gemuwia. Moeller 2016, 97.
Hdt. II, 136. Asychis (cf. Sasychis in Diod. I,94,3–4 and Sesonchis in Manetho) is Sheshonq I (942–924 BCE) of Dynasty 22, great conqueror and builder of many monuments. However, the Herodotean character of Asychis is also confused with Shepseskaf, builder of a pyramid and successor of Mycerinus (Menkaura).
Hdt. II, 101. Moeris is credited to be Amenemhat III who built his pyramid complex—known as the “Labyrinth”—and dug the Great Canal (mr wr cf. Gr.
Hdt. II, 121. Rhampsinitus is Ramses II and, in fact, fragments of his colossi have been found in front of the western pylon of Ptah.
Hdt.II, 153. The Embalming House of the Apis bulls has been located in the southern end of the temple enclosure.
Hdt.110, Diod. I,57,5. The Herodotean figure of Sesostris (Diod. Sesoosis) tends to unite the deeds of Ramses II and the name of Senwosret of the Twelfth Dynasty.
Hdt. II, 176.
Strabo XVII, 1,28.
Kitchen 1991; Snape 2014, see image at 36 [
Crawford 1984, 18, Thompson 1988 10–20 and fig. 3.
Casana et al. 2012; Beck et al. 2017.
Usoh et al. 1999.
Langbehn et al. 2018.
Langbehn et al. 1999.
Fernandes and Feiner 2016.
Usually a machine capable to run all the newest games at the highest graphics settings for at least some years.
For the interpretation of the historical sources on the Memphite landscape see the fundamental work described in Bunbury and Jeffreys 2011. Also noteworthy for the discussion on Herodotus’s reliability is the discovery of a baris type of ship in Aboukir Bay in 2003 that corroborated his description (Hdt.II,96). Belov 2018, Vinson 1998.
Moeller 2016.
Thomson 1988; Bresciani 1958.
Jeffreys and Tavares 1994.
Giddy 1994, 191–192.
Belova and Ivanov 2016.
Sullivan 2017.
Forte and Danelon 2019.
Ozludil 2016.
Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien, Plates, sec. I, vol. I, pl. 9, available online at
Jeffreys 2009; Sullivan 2017.
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