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This story of an archeological dig and the translations of papyri was conceived and written by Matthew Gray and myself. Neither one of us read the other's work until we had finished our own. As such, there are a few discrepancies in the text, but that only leads to a greater ambiguity about what really happened. That was our goal. We hope you enjoy the texts of Ehab and Hany.
Creation of the graphics and text
 
Both line drawings were hand drawn in Adobe Illustrator, then rasterized in Adobe Photoshop. The map of Cairo was copied by eye from maps in National Geographic magazine into a multi-layer Illustrator file.
The map of the site was originally scanned as line art from A History of Architecture. After coloring the background, a papyrus texture was applied in Fractal Design Painter. Back in Photoshop, several new layers were created in the image. Above the texture layer, I placed another copy of the black and white map, then varied the transparency (by 'painting' with an airbrush) throughout the image. This created gray 'streaks' in the map image; it also helped darken the lines. A layer mask allowed me to create the ripped edges. Spray painting the edges with a dark brown and an opacity setting of 40% lead to rough burn marks. I then repeated the process with opacity set to 20%, 10% and finally 4%, while painting further in from the edge. A shadow was created on the third layer, and all the labels were placed on the topmost layer.
A line art scan from A History of Architecture served as the basis for the plan of the Khufu pyramid. After editing it slightly, parts of the image were highlighted by painting with the brush in Adobe Photoshop.
Sarah's notes were simple yellow rectangles in Adobe Photoshop rotated and given a shadow with Alien Skin's Black Box filters.
All the text was created and edited in BBEdit.
Sources consulted
Lehner, Mark. "Computer Rebuilds the Ancient Sphinx." National Geographic, April 1991, 32-43.
Macaulay, David. Pyramid. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975.
Mencken, August. Designing and Building the Great Pyramid. Baltimore: Privately printed, 1963.
Roberts, David. "Egypt's Old Kingdom." National Geographic, January 1995, 2-39.
Sameh, Waley-el-dine. Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. Translated from the German by Michael Bullock. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964.
Egyptian links
Odyssey in Egypt
Giza Plateau Computer Model
The Great Pyramid of Giza
Egyptology News and Gossip
Babylonian and Egyptian Mathematics
Egypt Interactive
The Great Pyramid
Back to the opening.
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