Tag: ancientegypt

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Ancient Web: A 12-Year-Old’s 1999 Page on Osiris and Isis Is Still Online

One of the best things the old Web preserved was work that nobody would bother turning into a platform today. Guardian’s Egypt still hosts a mythology page written in 1999 by Whitney Bayuk, age 12, about Osiris and Isis.

Read the 1999 Osiris and Isis page

The page is exactly what it says it is: a young student’s explanation of the Egyptian myth, presented with artwork, a bibliography and links back into the site’s Ancient Egypt Kids Connection.

Nothing about it has been sanded down into anonymous educational content.

A Student Voice Frozen in HTML

The essay introduces Geb, Nut, Isis, Nephthys, Set and Osiris, then tells the familiar story of Osiris’s murder, Isis’s search, the restoration of his body and Horus’s eventual conflict with Set.

The writing is direct and personal. It includes phrases such as “I will talk of this myth in this essay” and ends by saying the author hopes the reader enjoyed it and learned something.

That may sound ordinary, but ordinary student work almost never survives online for twenty-seven years.

The page also credits a sculpture image to Whitney and lists print sources in a short bibliography. A copyright notice dates the work to 1999.

When Educational Websites Had Rooms for Kids

Guardian’s Egypt reflects an older model of educational publishing. Instead of one standardized content system, sites often had hand-built subareas: kids’ pages, essays, image galleries, historical notes and contributor material.

The result could be uneven, but it also gave individual voices space to exist.

For web-history researchers, this page is useful precisely because it is not famous. It shows what children, teachers and hobbyist site owners were putting online during the late 1990s, when publishing a school-age essay to the open Web still felt like a meaningful act.

For anyone studying how the Web became social long before social media, pages like this are evidence hiding in plain sight.

Visit the Osiris and Isis essay

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Ancient Web: Reeder’s Egypt Page Went Deep on the Weird Corners of Egyptology

Reeder’s Egypt Page does not try to explain all of ancient Egypt before lunch. It goes straight for subjects obscure enough that even the homepage calls one of them suitable for “Egyptomaniacs only.”

Visit Reeder’s Egypt Page

The site belongs to Greg Reeder and describes itself as a place for examining the art, archaeology, religion and history of Egypt. Its front page is essentially a set of gateways into deep specialist topics rather than a general-purpose encyclopedia.

One major section concerns the Fifth Dynasty tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep at Saqqara, two royal manicurists whose joint burial and iconography have generated extensive scholarly discussion. Another examines the tekenu, the mysterious shrouded figure appearing in Egyptian funerary scenes. A third looks at the muu and their ritual dance.

There is also an Egyptian gallery of paintings and photographs plus links to other Egyptology material.

This is what specialist publishing looked like before everything became a wiki

The value of a page like this is not that it settles disputed interpretations. It does something simpler and more durable: it preserves a researcher’s chosen trail through difficult material.

That distinction matters. A general encyclopedia tends to compress a subject toward consensus and summary. A specialist personal site can linger on the awkward bits—the tomb scene nobody agrees about, the ritual figure that resists a clean explanation, the obscure terminology that disappears from simplified histories.

The page also reflects a recognizable old-Web research style. Instead of hiding the subject hierarchy behind a database interface, the homepage announces exactly what the author finds interesting and lets the visitor descend from there. The site’s personality comes from selection.

For modern researchers, exact names such as Niankhkhnum, Khnumhotep, Saqqara, tekenu and muu are also search anchors. This is precisely the sort of long-tail terminology that gives CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list value beyond nostalgia. Old specialist pages often preserve vocabulary that larger contemporary sites mention only in passing.

Reeder’s page is a reminder that the Web became useful partly because experts and enthusiasts could publish before anyone granted them a content slot.

You did not need to propose an Egyptology vertical.

You needed some HTML and a subject weird enough to keep thinking about.

Explore Greg Reeder’s Egyptology pages