The Funerary Chapel of Ka(i)pura, Saqqara, Egypt - archaeological recreations and simulations - The Institute for the Visualization of History

The Funerary Chapel of Ka(i)pura
Saqqara, Egypt

Searching for Ancient Egypt

Learning Sites was approached jointly by the Dallas Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology regarding their traveling exhibition Searching for Ancient Egypt: Art, Architecture, and Artifacts from the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

The exhibition included one wall of the funerary chapel of Ka(i)pura, from the nearly complete structure in the collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (included among over 138 objects covering a range of Egyptian antiquities in the exhibition). The museums were looking for a captivating way of presenting to visitors what the tomb may originally have looked like and how it functioned, especially the false door, part of an entire wall that would be a prominent feature of the exhibition.

The Traveling Tomb

Some of the prerequisites of the resulting audiovisual presentation were:

it had to run on readily available current technologies (as of 1997)
it had to be portable enough to travel to the other venues in the exhibits schedule
it had to be durable enough to withstand continuous play over the course of the exhibition’s travels
it had to be visible to large groups of people moving through the gallery
it had to convey to the audience the date, the function, and the context of the false door and the tomb
it had to run for relatively short duration

Cataloging the Carvings

Closeup of the hieroglyphics on the false door of the funerary chapel of Ka(i)pura; © Bill Howze

Archaeological data about the tomb including drawings of the wall carvings, were supplied by curators at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Photographs to be used as part of the reconstruction were to be provided from among a new batch being shot as the tomb was dismantled for cleaning, transport, and publication in the exhibition catalogue.

Additional research about the original site of the chapel, about Saqqara, and about objects that might have been found in the chapel as part of the offerings was all left up to the historians at Learning Sites.

The exhibition made the following stops:

Dallas Museum of Art (closed on February 8, 1998)
Denver Art Museum (closed on August 2, 1998)
Seattle Art Museum (closed on January 17,1999)
Joslyn Art Museum (closed on July 25, 1999)
Birmingham Museum of Art (closed on January 16, 2000)
Honolulu Academy of Arts (closed on July 23, 2000)

Reference
Page Created: October 31, 2004
Page Updated: October 31, 2004
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Page Author: The Institute for the Visualization of History