5000 years of Egypt

Positives outweigh negatives, however (though it will be a closer race if you don't have a broadband connection), and if you like what you see, there's more to come. The job of scanning, posting, and interrelating artifacts is expected to continue for some years, and whether or not you ever visit Egypt, there will be a strong incentive to occasionally keep in touch with its web home.

The main collection can be explored in a variety of ways - geographically or chronologically, by type (artifacts, characters and places) or topic listing, through articles, and by following Connections. In this last option, people, artifacts and locations are linked to each other via omnidirectional Tree Diagrams, leaving the visitor's explorations in the hands of serendipity. A smaller, but still significant, collection of Multimedia options offers such Flash/Shockwave features as virtual period tours of Alexandria and the Temple at Luxor, 3D rotatable views of 39 different artifacts, panoramas, webcams, more than 1500 zoomable, high resolution photographs, and 51 animated demonstrations of such subjects as Egyptian clothing and pyramid construction.

A built-in text-to-speech capability accompanies much of the content. For those interested in some of the details about the construction of the site, About Eternal Egypt offers a behind-the-scenes video, and details on such subjects as, "Image Acquisition and Content Creation," and an essay on the advantages of making the guide available to mobile phones.

The scope, quality, and quantity of items collected here is staggering; and the extensive crosslisting can keep you going for days. (For example, a page for Tutankhamun includes links to 26 articles, a glossary entry, related entries from the site's other navigational options, and a Connections listing of 55 artifacts from the tomb - and each of those pages will have their own set of additional related pages.) The site's guided tour and help pages will be invaluable to those who want to take the best advantage of the various navigational options, while casual browsers can simply dive in and see where their impulses take them.

The look of the site has a touch of "vintage" to it (vintage in this case meaning the mid-90s look of the icons that decorate the web pages), but in this case, it works nicely. The content is a bit too big for 800x600 screens, so those of us using the lower resolutions will have to resign ourselves to a lot of horizontal scrolling - a necessity that becomes annoyingly familiar since the so many site functions require reloading a given web page, which naturally reloads in a top-left position. (Fortunately, many of the interactives offer the option of opening into popup windows, which easily fit into 800x600 dimensions.)

Eternal Egypt can be found at http://www.eternalegypt.org/.

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