Seen from the air

During the six years in which Egypt’s Western Desert was closed to any archaeological work for security reasons, Google Earth represented the only way to remotely gain some sort of access to the area. The new images, progressively uploaded, kept us updated on the movements of the sand and of the development of land reclaiming schemes. Besides that, they progressively revealed their potential to study position and connections among the various sites, that is, the ‘bigger picture’ that is sometimes difficult to grasp at ground level (cf. Rossi 2022: 1-4). The increasing resolution of satellite images played an important role: it shows the difference between the images of the Fortified Settlement of Umm al-Dabadib taken at the beginning of the history of Google Earth and then in 2007, 2010 and 2023. The 2010-2011 set of satellite images is indeed one of the best of the area, and can still function as useful tools (Rossi et al. 2022: 747). The images taken in subsequent years are blurred or difficult to interpret due to strong and uneven colours; the 2022-2023 set of images veers toward a bright, uniform yellow that makes the identification of different types of terrain difficult but offers a better resolution in terms of details in comparison with the past. Nowadays the entire oasis is visible at a good level of detail and this, together with the possibility to browse back in time, represents a new important tool to be fully exploited. As we shall see below, thanks to Google Earth it was possible to precisely locate and view from above sites that are currently not accessible for a number of reasons, to discuss the relative and absolute position of the Late Roman sites and to study their orientation.