Virtual Kahun: “Bringing Collections Together”

"The pyramid builders'' town of Kahun has been called "The Marie Celeste of Ancient Egypt". This website gives visitors the chance to explore the site in virtual reality, ''handle'' many of the artefacts excavated and to search the collections. Originally excavated by Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the ''Father of Egyptian Archaeology'', in 1889 and 1890, the site revealed many treasures of Daily Life in the Middle Kingdom. Petrie returned in 1911, 1914 and 1920 to complete smaller investigations, and to leave many questions unanswered. More recently The Royal Ontario Museum carried out a large-scale survey of the site in the 1990''s and made some new discoveries... For the first time since Petrie''s excavations, these collections have been brought together in a database allowing visitors to search the collections in both Manchester and London simultaneously. Combining Petrie''s site plans with those from the ROM excavations, we have developed a Virtual Kahun. Here visitors can explore the town as it may have been on the day it was originally deserted almost 4,000 years ago... This is the first full-screen, fully-controllable archaeological reconstruction on the internet. A higher resolution version can be visited in The Manchester Museum''s Discovery Centre."