Imaging the Egyptian Obelisk at Kingston Lacy

The obelisk that stands in the grounds of the National Trust property at Kingston Lacy, Dorset, was brought from Egypt in 1821 by William John Bankes. Known as the Philae obelisk, it has hieroglyphic inscriptions on the tapered granite column and Greek on the pedestal. In a multidisciplinary project to mark the success of the Philae comet mission, the inscriptions have been digitised by both reflectance transform imaging and 3D scanning. Novel imaging techniques have been developed to stitch together the separate RTI fields into a composite RTI for each face of the obelisk in registration with the geometric structure represented by the 3D point cloud. This will provide the basis for both paleographic examination of the inscriptions and visualisation of the monument as a whole.