Mashkan-shapir Iraq |
First Steps
It would be a challenge to meet the project goals of representing the new conception of what an early 2nd millennium city may have looked like, and doing so in ways that accurately visualized the evidence that indicated a green and water-based urban environment. Our first steps into this still on-going project entailed assembling the primary data about the site that would form the basis for the various computer models that would need to be built (of the site layout, building remains, canals, circuit walls, and site topography).The preliminary data included the aerial photographs, site grid plans, and the site-walking survey results and interpretations.
Investigation & Interpretation
Not all of the city had been excavated, only selected small portions of the vast settlement (and now the site has virtually disappeared at the hands of looters). Thus, for specifics about the city’s architecture, roads, and waterways, we had to rely on the investigators detailed interpretation of aerial photos and their walking survey of the site. In order to fill in information that was not directly available from Mashkan-shapir, we and the Dalton School staff decided to look for another site comparable in time, location, and layout for parallels we could use to complete our 3D re-creations.We chose the city of Nippur (only 35 km south of Mashkan-shapir) as our parallel site for several reasons, but key among them was the discovery at the site of an ancient plan of the city. This ancient plan, apparently etched to scale and drawn about 1500 BCE, during the Kassite period, shows in detail the layout of the major city features, including canals, temples, and city walls. All of those elements (and their relative locations) parallel similar urban features at Mashkan-shapir.
Screen grab from our virtual reality massing model of the city showing some of the major features (canals in blue; embankments in thick terracotta, misc. walls in brown, roads and alleys in white or light blue, and artifact scatters and low mounds in light brown). |
Upon comparison with the excavated evidence from Nippur, certain sectors of Mashkan-shapir will be compared to the Nippur map and then modeled. We will most likely focus on the religious precinct, the harbors, some residential sectors, and the probable garden area. These areas will then be built as 3D computer models to match the evidence as closely as possible. A series of panoramas will then be generated from the models to show students and teachers how the ancient city may originally have looked, and from there we will build a full package to use in the classroom.
This work is just beginning; as our modeling progresses through these stages, images will be available here and in the Gallery.
| click on the image to enlarge |
Aerial rendering from the virtual reality model of the city showing the major districts (religious, administrative, domestic, industrial, and garden) each bordered by canals; preliminary status model by VIZIN. |
Reference
Page Created: October 5, 2004
Page Updated:January 3, 2012
URL:https://www.vizin.org/projects/mashkan/solution.html
Page Author: The Institute for the Visualization of History
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