Egypt offers virtual tours of ancient sites
Virtual tours of a handful of Egypt’s archaeological marvels, including the ancient tomb of Queen Meresankh III and the fourth-century Red Monastery, are now available online.
If you’re looking for a great way to ‘explore’ while stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, this might be the perfect option. The 3D tours show the ancient Egyptian sites in stunning detail, allowing viewers to virtually ‘walk through’ different parts of the ruins, much like how the navigation on Google Street View works.
Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities began posting the tours as a way to share these wonders with people who are staying at home to help ‘flatten the curve’ during the coronavirus pandemic, the Ministry announced on its Facebook page.
One of the tours currently on offer – the tomb of Menna – features “one of the most visited and best preserved” of the elite tombs from the 18th Dynasty of 1549 BCE to 1292 BCE, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities wrote in the statement. The tomb, located in the Theban Necropolis – now modern-day Luxor – is known for its well-preserved paintings.
Little is known about Menna, but his tomb offers clues about his life among Egypt’s upper crust. Titles found in his tomb suggest he was a scribe who also oversaw the pharaoh’s fields and the temple of AmunRe, a form of the sun god.
“From the scenes depicted in his tomb we can see that Menna supervised delegations who measured the fields, brought defaulters to justice, inspected field work and recorded the yield of the crop,” Melinda Hartwig, ARCE president emeritus, wrote in the book The Tomb Chapel of Menna (TT 69): The Art, Culture, and Science of Painting in an Egyptian
Tomb.
All of these virtual tours “enable people worldwide to enjoy the ancient civilisation during their home confinement” as part of the measures “taken to fight coronavirus (COVID-19),” said the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. LAURA GEGGEL