Italian Egyptologist views future museums as 3-pronged: physical, digital, metaverse

Christian Greco, Italian Egyptologist and director of Museo Egizio in Turin, the second-largest museum in the world dedicated to Egyptian antiquities after Cairo, speaks during a talk entitled "Writing History in the Digital Age" at the Expo Centre Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, Nov. 4. The session was held as part of the ongoing 41st edition of the Sharjah International Book Fair. Courtesy of Sharjah Book Authority

Christian Greco discusses horizons for museums faced with challenges of 21st century at SIBF

By Park Han-sol

SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates ― How will a museum survive in the era of digitization and that new buzzword we can't seem to escape ― metaverse? Will the brick-and-mortar repositories of humanity's collective history give way to their virtual counterparts?

Egyptologist Christian Greco doesn't believe in that idea of a zero-sum game between the physical and the virtual.

In fact, the historian, who also serves as the director of Museo Egizio in Italy's Turin, the second-largest museum in the world dedicated to ancient Egyptian collections after Cairo, characterizes the future of museums as having three equally important pillars: the physical, the digital and the metaverse.

Greco hails from Italy, the Guest of Honor nation of the ongoing 41st edition of the Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Since last year, the annual book fair has emerged as the largest event of its kind not just in the Middle East but in the world in terms of purchasing and selling copyrights, according to the Sharjah Book Authority.

"The [physical] museum is a construction of modern and contemporary society. We are opening them all the time," he said at the Expo Centre Sharjah, Nov. 4, where 150 eminent authors, intellectuals and artists across the globe gathered to highlight their creative journeys and wide-ranging expertise during the event's 12-day run.

Explaining how the number of museums in Europe alone grew over 510 times in just two centuries ― from 35 in 1815 to 18,000 today ― he noted that the level of demand for such institutions from the general public remains just as high, as evidenced by the constantly rising number of visitors.

Installation view of the Gallery of the Kings inside Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy / Courtesy of Museo Egizio

Fundamentally speaking, however, are these museums a place of conservation or destruction? Well, a little bit of both, the Italian historian says.

"Yes, the material culture is preserved within the showcases, but ... when we see the objects in the [vitrine], we don't perceive them in the way they were meant for, [when or how] they were conceived and functioned in society."

By plucking the individual objects from their original context ― social, political, religious and geographical landscapes ― and displaying them as separate entities in a vacuum, these institutions have, in a sense, distorted our collective memory of the ancient past.

For instance, an inner coffin in ancient Egypt was called "suhet," which also meant an "egg," because it was the ritualistic place of transformation and the rebirth of the body within the tomb. "It was never meant to be in a showcase and publicly admired as a work of art!" Greco said.

And this is where digital museums and the metaverse can come into the picture, not to replace their brick-and-mortar counterparts, but rather, to work together to enhance our understanding of humanity's past.

After making it clear that the digital museum does not simply refer to a collection of databases and images uploaded on a website, the Egyptologist highlighted these virtual institutions need separate curators and exhibitions which can be set apart from the in-person ones ― like, bringing together relics that can never be together in real life.

The mummy of Petamenophis, who belonged to a wealthy family in Roman Egypt, can be one such case. The body of the small boy is housed in Greco's museum in Turin. His parents are in the Louvre in Paris. His grandparents are in the British Museum, while his siblings and cousins are located in Berlin. His aunt is all the way in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the family's tomb has been found back in Egypt.

Through a digitally rendered 3D model of the tomb that can summon mummies and funerary items dispersed across Europe in one place ― an afterlife reunion, if you will ― the virtual museum can provide a richer context for the present-day audience to visually understand the distant past.

"And it's not enough just to make a 3D model. The museum needs to have content [that the users can] visit and have someone explain it. We need to hire curators, who can take care of these digital institutions," the 47-year-old noted.

Installation view of the Coffin Gallery inside Museo Egizio in Turin / Courtesy of Museo Egizio

The idea of the metaverse, which envisions a fully realized, interactive digital universe with assets, environments and experiences all available within the virtual space, can even further change the dynamics of history museums, Greco argued.

In fact, he believes it could become a kind of a "time machine" that can present a whole different way to approach and understand the past.

For example, archaeologists and researchers can collect, translate and digitize all the inscriptions and resources in hand as historical evidence attesting to a certain period; subsequently, they can feed the verified information to machine learning-powered systems and the artificial intelligence to bring the text to virtual life.

"We can reconstruct the landscape, and then your avatar [in the metaverse] could meet an avatar of a person in the past. You could ask questions and the answers could be given based on the [input] sources," the museum director said.

"How wonderful would it be for me to be in front of Queen Hatshepsut [considered one of the greatest pharaohs] and to ask her about things that I now don't know?"

Of course, such a rosy picture is not without its concerns.

At least up until now, the talk of the metaverse itself has largely revolved around its commercial nature led by Big Tech. But if we want a cultural metaverse, so to speak, Greco emphasized the need for "public investment" and "collective research."

"I do not believe that we can be dependent on the agenda of a private, commercial entity, whatever it is, because this is our shared memory," he said.

There is also the issue of how unbiased sources that will be used in the digital universe can be and whether their historical narrative will be affected by the existing political, cultural power structure.

While pure "objectivity" is an impossible ideal to pursue in history by its nature, the Egyptologist nevertheless noted the importance of the hierarchy of sources and ethical codes, like the ones adopted by museums to uphold the integrity of their collections, to prevent any explicit misuse.

"Once again, I think the only means we have is the authority of public money. Public investment is something that represents the society, not just one place or country," he said.

"I think the metaverse can really deliver a different experience for all of humanity when it comes to our dealing with the past and memory. It can be a wonderful epistemological tool for the future, and we shouldn't stop research on that because we are afraid of what could be [its] misuse."

Visitors head to the crowded 4,000-square-meter venue of the Expo Centre Sharjah to attend the Sharjah International Book Fair. This year's event, running from Nov. 2 to 13, is hosting workshops, talks and seminars led by 150 authors and intellectuals from around the world, in addition to booths set up by 2,213 publishers from 95 countries. Courtesy of Sharjah Book Authority