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By Tricia O’Connor, Exhibit Developer
Ancient Egyptians worked years to design, build, carve and paint a pharoah’s tomb. We’ve got less than a year.
For National Geographic’s Treasures of the Earth, a new permanent exhibit opening on June 11, 2011, we’ve been working hard to create portions of a pharaoh’s tomb from Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.
The real tomb in Egypt is actually 450 feet long, cut deep into the rock – that’s longer than a football field. Each step takes the visitor deeper and deeper into this beautifully decorated tomb – with carved and decorated walls and ceilings.
At the museum, we needed to start with photographs of the tomb, so archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass had his lead photographer, Sandro Vaninni take a photo survey of the real tomb for us.
Since we can’t recreate the whole tomb in our exhibit, we’ve been “cutting and pasting” areas of the tomb we want to feature. Egyptologist Dr. David Silverman helped us choose the best images.
Then, our design draftsman, Jay Ganz, created a virtual model of the tomb area in our exhibit, and we mashed the photos onto the model. Check it out!
Now we just have to figure out how to carve and paint the walls!
