Obelisks Map

Ancient Egyptians created dozens of obelisks, mostly to commemorate pharaohs. Many of these obelisks were brought to Rome under Augustus and several of the following Roman Emperors who ruled over Egypt. More recent European colonial powers brought additional obelisks to France, Britain and the United States in the 19th century.

As a final project for Sebastian Heath's Spring 2015 Mapping and Data Vizualization of the Ancient World class, at The Institute for Studies of the Ancient World, NYU, I created an interactive spatial and temporal map tracking the stories of the obelisks. The map is accompanied by pop-up windows designed by Dalit Shalom with information from Wikipedia.

The live website can be found here.

Main sources for our data include:

Shoji Okamoto. Obelisk of the World. http://okamoto-shoji.jp/obelisk.htm

Sorek, Susan. The Emperors' Needles: Egyptian Obelisks and Rome. Liverpool University Press, 2010. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vj9pf

The map is powered cesium.js with a custom library of functions specific to this project called obelisks.js.

geoJSON data is on a gist: https://gist.github.com/Willjfield/26f9055c6704fdbd4acf

See issues for features I would like to finish, if given the opportunity to develop the project beyond this semester.