Videos of TT99 and Qurna

A new initiative undertaken in the 2000 season of work on the tomb was the production of digital video in Luxor. I have been for some years now trying to find additional ways of documenting the tomb in addition to the conventional scholarly techniques in use for many years. One thing which these tried and trusted methods do not achieve is to give the reader a real idea of what the tomb is actually like, what it feels to be there. So I have been making this web site and VR panoramas with this aim in mind, and digital video (DV) is the logical next step.

It requires the presence of a good DV camera, and I was able to obtain the loan of such a camera from the IT Services section of the British Museum. The camera was acquired in association with a pilot project within the BM to develop new and interesting ways of bring IT to help expeditions in the field with BM links. Older material has being transferred for us by the BM's Audo-Visual unit, who are also to advise on future work.

Below are some short videos which were filmed in Egypt during the 2000, 2001 and 2002 seasons. Back home I have made a 45 minute version of much of what is below, but this of course is too large to be put on the web in its present form.

Examples in TT99

• Reconstructing a pot
• Conserving a textile
• Conserving papyrus
• Drawing pots
• Drawing small finds
• Copying walls
• Working on coffins
• Photography
• Digging (film from 1996)
• Opening the tomb in 2001
• Erecting the tent in the courtyard in 2001
• Working on ostraka
• Identifying a funerary cone

• Reassembling a false door
• Packing finds
• Working on textiles
• Sorting bones
• Recording bones
• Moving finds out of the tomb
• Putting boxes down a shaft
• Sorting pottery
• Cleaning wall paintings
• Closing the tomb

Other Luxor subjects

• Dogs in TT99
• Dogs in TT99 2
• The journey home from the tomb

The average length of these clips is about 33 seconds, and most are now (July 2008) about 3.5mb in size, with a resolution of 600 x 480 pixels. They're not DV quality, but actually pretty good.

The web server used for the TT99 videos is NOT a streaming server; therefore viewers will have to wait until enough of the movie has downloaded for them to play.

See this page for technical notes on how the movies were originally produced.

I am very grateful to all in the British Museum who helped make this project feasible.