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A. Wutte, P. Ferschin, G. Suter:
"Spatial Analysis of Ancient Egyptian Monuments. Case Study: Late Period private funerary monuments of Thebes";
Talk: CAA - Computer Applications and Quantitavie Methods in Archeology, Oslo; 2016-03-29 - 2016-04-02.

The term of rock-cut tombs describe a type of funerary monuments found all over Egyptian history. Their designs and building concepts show a strong coherency within their local occurrence, in a specific timeframe and even within a social status class.
The chosen case study was analyzing private funerary rock-cut monuments of the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Egyptian dynasty, located in the Asasif, in Theben West, the modern Luxor. The major goal for this project was to obtain design principles of those rock-cut funerary architectures.
The structures were digitalized and converted into a BIM (Building Information Modeling) model to be analyzed for certain architectural properties (e.g. accessibility of spaces and areas like semi-public offering places and non-public cult places, decoration positions and natural lighting). Social, local and chronological data was integrated and the models could be compared with each other on the basis of those informations. Questions like the relationship between different premises and natural lighting, the position of decoration categories or the differences of semi-public and non-public parts in ratio to their accessibility could be answered. These analytical methods offer insights into the design principals of the monuments.
Additionally a Model Comparison Tool was implemented to offer interactive and visible information about the building typologies of the funerary monuments. This tool visualizes information about the buildings in combination with additional metadata (e.g. social parameters) within an abstracted spatial representation of the building. The monuments can be arranged by a set of parameters like social rank or sex of the owner, chronology of construction and land consumption. The developed tools are independent of archaeological content and type of buildings.

BIM, space model, spatial analysis