by Federico Rocchi
The Global Egyptian Museum
www.globalegyptianmuseum.com
The Global Egyptian Museum (GEM) is a web-site created, owned and maintained by the Centre for Computer-Aided Egyptological Research (CCER) of the Utrecht and Leiden Universities. The aim of this web-site is to render available worldwide the information related to a manifold of ancient Egyptian objects kept in many museums. It may be said that it is a kind of advanced development of the Egyptian Treasures in Europe "Project Champollion", of which a few CD-Roms have been published thusfar, of the same CCER. In fact, the web-site is, at present, a unified and integrated searchable system to give online access to the data thusfar collected for the "Project Champollion".
The first page that appears is a kind of gateway, where, after clicking on the name, the user can choose the language with which to read everything within the whole web-site; one can choose English, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French - thanks also to the Mutilingual Egyptological Thesaurus.To have access to the web-site, an account has to be set up; this account also provides the status of Friend of the Global Egyptian Museum. Four kinds of accounts are available, that can be devided in two main categories: private individual (annual fee of 50 Euro) and institutions (annual fees of 100, 250 and 1000 Euro depending on the nature of the institution). The paid fees will be used to improve and expand the GEM. Upon subscription the user receives a login and a password that must be entered to enter the main page of the web-site. Here all the searches of the objects in the database can be performed. A free 24 hour access is also possible, to test the web-site.
People who are familiar with the published CD-Roms of the series know that the database of objects can be searched according to a number of combined criteria: by museum, by type of object, by material, by period and by provenance. All the database queries can be done in basic or advanced modes. This last mode allows the expert to do more precise searches.
The museums that are now involved in the GEM are the Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis / Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire (Brussels), the National Museum of Ireland (Dublin), the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside (Liverpool), the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), the Institut de Papyrologie et d'Égyptologie (Lille), the Museo Arqueológico Nacional (Madrid), the Museo Egizio di Firenze (Florence), the Roemer- und Pelizaeus Museum (Hildesheim), the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia (Lisbon) and the Allard Pierson Museum (Amsterdam). These were also the museums involved in the Egyptian Treasures in Europe CD-Rom series. To the list of these museums will soon be added the State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg), the Ägyptisches Museum (Leipzig) and the National Museum of Antiquities (Leiden). It is hoped that in the future other museums will join this initiative (I'm thinking for instance about such collections as the Bologna Museum, the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge or the museums in the Northernmost part of Europe). While it now appears that mainly European collections are represented in the GEM, it is also hoped that in the future even museums in other continents may join.
I think that the strength of this virtual museum is to be found in the fact that many collections can be searched simultaneously and that comparisons of similar objects can be done thanks to an enormous number of items (now 6600 in total; it is foreseen that at the end of 2004 the number will be around 17500). This is a kind of thing that could be done only with books or with real trips to the various museums. Now it can be done simply with a click of the mouse. Those people that for various reasons cannot travel have finally the chance to see and to enjoy many objects in one place without leaving their armchairs at home.
The composition of the collections represented now in the GEM is as follows:
Amsterdam: 100 objects
Brussels: 1500 objects
Dublin: 1500 objects
Florence: 100 objects
Hildesheim: 100 objects
Lille: 100 objects
Lisbon: 100 objects
Liverpool: 1500 objects
Madrid: 100 objects
Vienna: 1500 objects
Leiden: 0 objects
Leipzig: 0 objects
St. Petersburg: 0 objects.
To give a few examples of what can be done. I tried
to search all the objects from Saqqara dated to the New Kingdom and all the 6 objects
now present in the GEM matching my search conditions were displayed (Brussels E2401,
Brussels E3053-3055, Brussels E6721, Florence 2566, Florence 3250, Vienna 5908). I
also tried to find all the scarabs and a list of 161 items was displayed. I then
tried all the stelae from the FIP and 5 objects were found (Dublin 1892, Brussels E8244,
Hildesheim 1875, Vienna 5893 and Vienna 5895).
With the free text search mode one can
search for specific words inside the description of the objects, but this feature has
space for further improvements from the CCER side.
The GEM has several big advantage compared to the CD-Roms of the Egyptian Treasures in Europe series; the CDs are static entities while a web-site can be improved, enlarged, expanded, corrected etc. A number of problems that the CDs now unfortunately have (I may mention for instance the fact that the promissed wealth of transcribed inscriptions, given as both glyphs and as MdC codes for glyphprocessors and their translations from many monuments, is not so wealthy at all) can be solved in the future. It is true that the CDs, on the other side, have the advantage of being less expensive and less time consuming as far as Internet connections are involved. For this reason the CCER has decided to continue the publication of the CD-Roms too. These will be given free of charge to those who subscribe to the GEM in the years to come. In any case from my visits to the GEM I can say that the speed with which the virtual museum can be searched is reasonable (even with a 56 Kb/s modem), eventhough unfortunate days can be encountered.
Guides, thematic sections, museum views and a glossary are provided. A very nice section is dedicated to kids. Here funny pages with quizzes, maps and the Egyptian gods, explaining several features of the Egyptian civilization can be found.
My overall judgement about the GEM is positive. Many things are still to be done, because the possible improvements that can be thought of are numerous. But the good features that a dynamical web-site offers assure that all what can be technologically done will surely be done; input from the users, I presume, will not only be not welcome but will be taken and considered with the highest attention, since the users are those who pay for the services the GEM offers. If the future can be judged from what we have now, I can say without doubts that the GEM is destined to be a major tool for Egyptological research, for fun and for culture. The CCER is on the right way to produce good things in the years to come and if everything is properly done we'll all sensibly benefit from these efforts.
Federico Rocchi
rocfed@tin.it
7/03/2003