Process/Write-up
My process for this project started with downloading the metadata from the British Museum. I then cleaned the data in OpenRefine, consolidating the variation in site names referring to the same place. Once I had the data clean the next challenge was getting the coordinates of each site, as the find spots were just names which ArcGIS can’t read. As there are 3.5k objects and 153 different sites I was not thrilled about doing it by hand, so I wrote a python script to get the location from OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap only allows one request per second, so it took about 50 minutes to run. At minute thirty I realized I’d made a mistake and forgotten to restrict the country codes to countries where I knew I had sites. Therefore when I looked at the resulting file, the coordinates for a few of the sites were completely in the wrong spot. I did learn that there are a lot of Midwestern small towns named after Egyptian ones. Some places also had to be manually entered as they didn’t appear in the OpenStreetMap database, such as the Palace of Amenhotep III. Overall, I went back over all the coordinates and eventually got them to be correct (to the best of my knowledge).
After I got the coordinates I fed it into ArcGIS Online and adjusted the symbology to clusters, which varied in size based on artifact count and in color by site. My legend was decided by the sites with the most amount of artifacts and also sites outside of the Egyptian heartland. I then created the web app in ArcGIS Experience Builder and wrote all of the contextual descriptions. I created the filters using the Expression Builder and SQL. The filters were checked for accuracy against a program I wrote that counted the appearances of each individual.
I went for a web map because I think that the story of the objects of the 18th Dynasty is a story of space. During a period of militaristic and economic expansion Egyptian influence and objects spread through the Eastern Mediterranean. In Egypt itself space can indicate ideological shifts, such as what happened with Amarna, and showcase the concentration of religious and state power. The filters are meant to allow users to narrow down the immense amount of objects to a size that allows the asking of more detailed questions. In my mind it is primarily meant to serve as a jumping off point for other research to be done.
I think my main faults would be the relatively small selection of artifacts. While the dataset seems large, a large portion of these artifacts were excavated by the same groups and archaeologists and 3,500 artifacts is definitely not representative of an entire dynasty. If I wanted to create a better map I would’ve included the data sets of more museums and other archaeological sources and done more in-depth research on the objects themselves. Also, this is obviously a very specific niche and I’m not entirely sure that someone without any context at all, even with the context I provided, could gain anything meaningful from my map.
Presentation is another issue I had. While I changed the symbology to be in clusters, some distinct sites get combined if the user is zoomed too far out, which may be detrimental to the experience. I’ll be the first to admit that web design is a pitfall of this project as I struggled with getting the embedded StoryMap to look right. Some of the controls within the web map are also quite clunky.
I discussed my results in the StoryMap, but I wanted to discuss the relevance of my project to Digital Humanities versus data analysis. I think that my project lies in the realm of DH, as the main question I had about what the find spots of these artifacts reveals was one of correlation, do more important pharaohs have a larger material record, but also a question of the nature of the material record.
Bibliography
Antiquities Law Primer. . Antiquity and America. https://bcma.bowdoin.edu/antiquity/antiquities-law-primer/, accessed February 20, 2025.
Cline, Eric. 1987. Amenhotep III and the Aegean: A Reassessment of Egypto-Aegean Relations in the 14th Century B.C. Orientalia 56(1):1–36.
Hodgkinson, Anna K., and Miriam Bertram. 2020. Working with Fire: Making Glass Beads at Amarna Using Methods from Metallurgical Scenes. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 33:102488. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2020.102488.
Maree, Marcel. 2009. Egyptian Stelae from Malta.
Merrillees, R. S. 1972. Aegean Bronze Age Relations with Egypt. American Journal of Archaeology 76(3):281–294. https://doi.org/10.2307/503921.
Nielsen, Nicky. 2022. The New Kingdom of Egypt under the Eighteenth Dynasty. In The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Volume III: Volume III: From the Hyksos to the Late Second Millennium BC, edited by Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller, and D. T. Potts, p. 0. Oxford University Press.
Pulak, Cemal. THE ULUBURUN SHIPWRECK AND LATE BRONZE AGE TRADE.
The Gods of the Egyptians; or, Studies in Egyptian Mythology, by E. A. Wallis Budge…With 98 Coloured Plates and 131 Illustrations in the Text… Vol.1. . HathiTrust. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101041968650?urlappend=%3Bseq=11, accessed February 20, 2025.
The Ship from Uluburun and the Ship from Tyre: An International Trade Network in the Ancient Near East on JSTOR. . https://www.jstor.org/stable/27931843?seq=1, accessed February 20, 2025.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. 2001. . In . Oxford University Press.