From the Sphinx to King Tut, a Feast for Budding Egyptologists
By CHRIS LARSON

Seven millenniums of Egyptian culture and history are now available in a most modern way: through a new Web site called Eternal Egypt. A result of three years of cooperation between I.B.M. and Egypt's government and major museums, Eternal Egypt is intended to encourage preservation while providing an immense amount of data that could formerly be absorbed only by visiting Egypt. And of course, the Egyptian government hopes that some of the virtual tourists will be persuaded to make the actual trip.

With 3-D scanners and other hardware donated by I.B.M., the country's considerable museum collections were digitized and loaded onto www.eternalegypt.org.

The site offers high-resolution 360-degree views of artifacts, with written and oral explanations in English, French and Arabic. Also available are interactive maps and timelines; views from live Webcams in Egypt; virtual reconstructions of the Sphinx as it looked 2,000 years ago; and, as shown above, the treasure-filled tomb of King Tutankhamen as it looked when it was discovered in 1922.

The material at the Web site is also available on hand-held guides that visitors can use at Egypt's museums, and through text and picture displays that can be received by cellphone at the museums and historic sites.

Eternal Egypt went live on Tuesday. Thousands more artifacts are to be added over time, and Egypt hopes the site will eventually include items that are no longer in Egypt, like the Rosetta stone. I.B.M. expects the concept and the scanning and database technologies developed for the project to be applied at other museums and cultural collections worldwide. Chris Larson