What did ancient Egyptians smell, touch, hear, and see when they entered their great cemeteries, now buried under millennia of windblown sand? Were tombs just places to bury the dead? These questions drive the research of Sergio Alarcón Robledo, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern languages and civilizations. Alarcón Robledo used photogrammetry to reconstruct the layout of the North Saqqara necropolis, creating three-dimensional models that reveal the visual and acoustic properties of this sacred space. Robledo’s work is reshaping our understanding of the sensory experience ancient architects hoped to create when planning and building Egyptian tombs, bringing us a more holistic picture of the past.
