Down among the dead men.

You heard quite a lot about Egypt in first year architectural history: pylons, hypostyle halls, papyrus and lotus paradigms and of course the Stepped Pyramid of Zoser, and that bent one where they got the point seriously wrong. You might think that with all those portentously voice-overed tv programmes on Discovery and History channels churning out the same old stuff about mummy's curses and blokes in wigs and tie-on braided beards, that saturation point has long since been reached. But here at www.thebanmappingproject.com (no nothing to do with banning mapping) is the Theban Mapping Project. Thebes (present-day Luxor) is that place halfway up the Nile near where they buried some of the pharaohs, including poor king Tut, in the Valley of the Kings. Archaeology involves a lot of digging up dead people so it isn't the jolliest of activities but this web site is really, really good. Since 1978 the American University in Cairo has been surveying the tombs and temples of Thebes, lots of them, excavating some and developing a database of plans and sections and, in some cases, three-dimensional models of the tombs. You normally select sites according to the former occupant's name. You get a set of printable plans, sections, an axo, zoomable thumbnails--there are, for example, 33 photos attached to the Rameses VII section--plus an extensive bibliography to do with the specific tomb as well as related articles. Then you can get a spoken description and often an interactive axonometric. And you can also search on a variety of topics such as architectural features, graffiti, date, condition, explorers and so on. It's a very dense and complex site done with great simplicity and containing some nice surprises. You couldn't ask for more.