Welcome to the website of the Desert Networks project
“Desert Networks” is a scientific research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC-2017-STG, Proposal number 759078) for five years (2017/11 to 2022/10). It is hosted by the HiSoMA research center at Lyon (CNRS), member of the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée, with a dozen researchers and engineers directly involved in the project and many collaborations with other colleagues and institutions, starting with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The project focuses on the physical, economic and social networks that have linked the Egyptian Eastern Desert and have enabled people to survive in a hostile environment and to exploit its resources for almost two millennia, from the mid-second millennium BC until the late third-early fourth century AD (see here for a thorough presentation of the project and the team).
A gateway to the results of the project
This website is a gateway to accessing the results of the project, as the team’s work advances, through different pages and tools. It includes:
- A gazetteer of the more than 250 archaeological sites and more than 200 watering places located in the Eastern desert, providing complete information on the sites, their remains, location, archaeological and textual finds, chronology, historiography, bibliography, images, with a search tool;
- A “Networks” page, dedicated to the presentation of the networks and geospatial models that have been reconstructed by the project's team;
- An interactive map, which makes it possible to search for sites by location, chronology and characteristics, with additional shapefiles available;
- A “Missions and Travelers” page, dedicated to the more than 80 exploratory and study missions that have studied the region’s sites, listing the members of the team, and their works;
- A bibliography, with more than 1600 titles, searchable by site or keywords;
- An image library which brings together more than 1000 plans, ancient drawings, photographs and almost 300 maps (topographic, historical) of the region.
