Mahmoud: A GIS-based Study of Cemetery En Echelon

May Farouk Mahmoud, 

A GIS-based Study of CemeteryEn Echelon,

Berlin, 2010. - 447 pp. - pdf-file (45.4 MB)

It is widely accepted among Egyptologists that ancient Egyptian
cemeteries can express the socio-economic status of their
inhabitants spatially. However, no studies have been yet devoted
to research the overall spatial organization of those cemeteries nor
to the interrelationships of the individual tombs. Geographical
Information Systems (GIS) are currently a well known utility used
within archaeological research as a data management tool, but its
use in sorting information gained from the field for the purposes of
historical research is still a subject of explorative attempts. Though
GIS can provide a well-structured descriptive and analytical tool for
identifying spatial patterns, its potential is far from being realized in
investigating the non-uniformity in the socio-economic status for highly
organised societies like Ancient Egypt. There are three basic categories
of use that GIS can be put to: as a spatially referenced database; as
a visualization tool; and as an analytic tool. Those three categories
can be utilised to explore the socio-economic factors involved in
a cemetery on various levels: by the analysis of the spatial distribution
of tombs and their components, by calculating the expenditure used
for their construction and by determining the privileges of their locations
in relation to accessibility and visibility conditions ... The study was
concerned with the spatial analysis of the 2382 tombs of the entire
Giza cemetery concentrating the socio-economic analysis on the
427 tombs which are located in CEE."