Harvard’s Digital Giza Project allows scholars to explore Egypt — without leaving the country
Four thousand years ago, a member of Egypt’s elite was buried on the Giza Plateau in an elaborate stone tomb, complete with several rooms and underground chambers. Then, in 1912, a team from Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston excavated the tomb, of a type called a mastaba, and brought back with them a limestone wall from its chapel. The wall, housed at the MFA, is inscribed with images of the deceased, an official named Akh-meret-nesut, and his family in various poses — sitting, leaning on a staff, throwing a lasso. Today, more than a century later, Harvard doctoral student Inês Torres wants to know as much as she can about Akh-meret-nesut: who he was, what he did, and why he was buried on the Giza Plateau in the shadow of the pyramids long after pharaohs’ burials there had ceased. But Torres faces a problem familiar to many scholars...