Unknown interiors of ancient Egypt: producing by artificial intelligence in the context of light-space relationship
Abstract
This study presents a design method aimed at visualizing cultural heritage through the architecture of ancient Egypt using modern technologies. With the deepening of the digital age, the use of digital technology and artificial intelligence in cultural heritage research has become an important tool for renewing and disseminating period architecture. The reason for choosing the interior spaces of ancient Egypt as a sample in this study is that, in addition to leaving a rich heritage in the field of architecture, ancient Egypt offers distinct period architecture in terms of space-light relationship. As a result of literature review, keywords related to architecture and the relationship between space and light in the Ancient Period were identified, and the study was visualized using the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology of today, namely human-computer interaction combined with text-to-image technology. The motivation and aim of this study is to demonstrate the role of reanimating cultural heritage like ancient period architectures in the computer environment based on interpretation, contributing to architectural sustainability, and spreading to future periods.
Keyword : architectural visualization, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, space-light, ancient Egypt, architectural design
How to Cite
Çelik, T. (2025). Unknown interiors of ancient Egypt: producing by artificial intelligence in the context of light-space relationship. Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 49(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.3846/jau.2025.21202
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
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Nichol, A., Dhariwal, P., Ramesh, A., Shyam, P., Mishkin, P., McGrew, B., Sutskever, I., & Chen, M. (2021). Glide: Towards photorealistic image generation and editing with text-guided diffusion models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.10741.
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Ramadan, E., & Wu, Y. (2021). Effect of Egyptian culture on the design of jewelry (cultural design based on ancient Egyptian patterns). Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 13(4), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.36
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Shin, Y. S. (2001). Research on culture of costume in Coptic paintings in ancient Egypt-based on book research. Journal of Fashion Business, 5(5), 36–48.
Shonkwiler, R. L. (2014). The Behdetite: A study of Horus the Behdetite from the Old Kingdom to the conquest of Alexander. The University of Chicago.
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Zeng, Q., Lee, M., & Eune, J. (2023). Digital design method of cultural heritage using ancient Egyptian theological totem. Heliyon, 9(5), Article e15960. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e15960
Zhou, Y., Liu, B., Zhu, Y., Yang, X., Chen, C., & Xu, J. (2023). Shifted diffusion for text-to-image generation. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 10157–10166). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR52729.2023.00979
Agirbas, A. (2022). A teaching methodology on the combination of architectural tradition and parametric design: A case study with birdhouses. International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 11(1), 149–168. https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00068_1
Agirbas, A., & Yildiz, E. (2023). The effect of muqarnas on acoustic quality of traditional Turkish bath interior space. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 16(3), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1145/3589248
Chang, M., Druga, S., Fiannaca, A. J., Vergani, P., Kulkarni, C., Cai, C. J., & Terry, M. (2023). The prompt artists. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (pp. 75–87). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3591196.3593515
Chepchumba, N. (2013). History of daylighting strategies: A comparative analysis across the periods. Luminous Environment, 14.
Çelik, T. (2023a). Generative design experiments with artificial intelligence: Reinterpretation of shape grammar. Open House International. https://doi.org/10.1108/OHI-04-2023-0079
Çelik, T. (2023b). Architectural design method suggestion with machine learning technologies based on Voronoi diagram principle. Periodica Polytechnica Architecture, 54(1), 12–28. https://doi.org/10.3311/PPar.21643
Çelik, T. (2023c). The role of artificial intelligence for the architectural plan design: Automation in decision-making. In Proceedings of the 2023 8th International Conference on Machine Learning Technologies (pp. 133–138). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3589883.3589903
Dall-E. (2024). https://openai.com/index/dall-e-2/
Dodd, L. S., Scott, D. A., Nikias, G. A., Au, J., & Ramos, A. (2009). The ritual significance of colour: Specialised pigments in a wooden Egyptian funerary statuette from the New Kingdom. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 95(1), 83–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/030751330909500105
Dunn, N. (2014). Architectural modelmaking (2nd ed.). Hachette.
Efimova, V., & Filchenkov, A. (2022). Text-based sequential image generation. In Fourteenth International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2021) (Vol. 12084, pp. 125–132). SPIE. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2622734
ElNashar, E., Zlatev, Z., & Ilieva, J. (2016). Textile patterns based on ancient Egyptian ornaments. Applied Researches in Technics Technologies and Education, 4(2), 92–104. https://doi.org/10.15547/artte.2016.02.002
Fletcher, B. (1961). A history of architecture on the comparative method. The Athlone Press.
Foroughi, M., & Javadi, S. (2017). Examining the symbolic meaning of colors in Ancient Egyptian painting art and their origin in environment. Bagh-e Nazar, 14(53), 65–74.
Gu, S., Chen, D., Bao, J., Wen, F., Zhang, B., Chen, D., Yuan, L., & Guo, B. (2022). Vector quantized diffusion model for text-to-image synthesis. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 10696–10706). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.01043
Guan, B., Zang, Y., Chen, B., Ye, S., Li, A., & Liu, T. (2015). Study on computer aided inspected point planning based on human-computer interaction. Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering, 15(3), 569–583. https://doi.org/10.3233/JCM-150569
Hosny, M. (2020). Light, darkness and shadow in ancient Egypt. Journal of Association of Arab Universities for Tourism and Hospitality, 18(3), 35–49. https://doi.org/10.21608/jaauth.2020.40136.1064
Kuehni, R. G. (1980). Color and colorants in ancient Egypt. Color Research & Application, 5(3), 169–172. https://doi.org/10.1002/col.5080050310
Kulkarni, C., Druga, S., Chang, M., Fiannaca, A., Cai, C., & Terry, M. (2023). A word is worth a thousand pictures: Prompts as AI design material. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.12647.
Le Corbusier. (1931). Towards a new architecture. Architectural Press.
Liu, W. (2008). Egyptian archaeology.
Lookx. (2024). https://www.lookx.ai/
Mahmoud, H. T. H. (2017). Geometric patterns in Egyptian architecture & interior design. The Academic Research Community Publication, 1(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21625/archive.v1i1.140
Mandelli, A., Perfetti, L., Fiorillo, F., Fassi, F., Rossi, C., & Greco, C. (2019). The digitalization of ancient Egyptian coffins: A discussion over different techniques for recording fine details. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 42, 743–750. https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-2-W15-743-2019
Midjourney. (2024). https://www.midjourney.com/
Momigliano, A. (1987). Storia e storiografia antica. Il Mulino.
Moore, F. (1991). Concepts and practice of architectural daylighting. John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Nichol, A., Dhariwal, P., Ramesh, A., Shyam, P., Mishkin, P., McGrew, B., Sutskever, I., & Chen, M. (2021). Glide: Towards photorealistic image generation and editing with text-guided diffusion models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.10741.
Paananen, V., Oppenlaender, J., & Visuri, A. (2024). Using text-to-image generation for architectural design ideation. International Journal of Architectural Computing, 22(3), 458–474. https://doi.org/10.1177/14780771231222783
Pavlidis, G., Koutsoudis, A., Arnaoutoglou, F., Tsioukas, V., & Chamzas, C. (2007). Methods for 3D digitization of cultural heritage. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 8(1), 93–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2006.10.007
Pavlov, N. L. (2019). The sun ray as a tool to design an architectural form. Light & Engineering, 27(2). https://doi.org/10.33383/2018-069
Pimentel, T., & Branco, V. (2005). Dynamic and interactive typography in digital art. Computers & Graphics, 29(6), 882–889. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2005.09.005
Raffel, C., Shazeer, N., Roberts, A., Lee, K., Narang, S., Matena, M., Zou, Y., Li, W., & Liu, P. J. (2020). Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to-text transformer. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 21(140), 1–67.
Ragai, J. (1986). Colour: Its significance and production in Ancient Egypt. Endeavour, 10(2), 74–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-9327(86)90134-1
Ramadan, E., & Wu, Y. (2021). Effect of Egyptian culture on the design of jewelry (cultural design based on ancient Egyptian patterns). Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 13(4), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.36
Ramesh, A., Pavlov, M., Goh, G., Gray, S., Voss, C., Radford, A., Chen, M., & Sutskever, I. (2021). Zero-shot text-to-image generation. In International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 8821–8831). PMLR.
Rossi, C. (2019). Immaterial data and material culture; Surveying and modelling the New Kingdom tombs of Saqqara. Saqqara Newsletter, 17, 61–71.
Rossi, C. (2020). On measuring ancient Egyptian architecture. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 106(1–2), 229–238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0307513320975782
Shin, Y. S. (2001). Research on culture of costume in Coptic paintings in ancient Egypt-based on book research. Journal of Fashion Business, 5(5), 36–48.
Shonkwiler, R. L. (2014). The Behdetite: A study of Horus the Behdetite from the Old Kingdom to the conquest of Alexander. The University of Chicago.
Talasila, V., & Narasingarao, M. R. (2022). BI-LSTM based encoding and GAN for text-to-image synthesis. Sensing and Imaging, 23(1), Article 23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11220-022-00390-6
Tan, Z., Yang, X., Ye, Z., Wang, Q., Yan, Y., Nguyen, A., & Huang, K. (2023). Semantic similarity distance: Towards better text-image consistency metric in text-to-image generation. Pattern Recognition, 144, Article 109883. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2023.109883
Wang, Z., Quan, Z., Wang, Z. J., Hu, X., & Chen, Y. (2020). Text to image synthesis with bidirectional generative adversarial network. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) (pp. 1–6). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICME46284.2020.9102904
Webster, J., Trevino, L. K., & Ryan, L. (1993). The dimensionality and correlates of flow in human-computer interactions. Computers in Human Behavior, 9(4), 411–426. https://doi.org/10.1016/0747-5632(93)90032-N
Xu, J., Liu, K., & Yuan, Y. (2022). A novel MG 2D animation design method under the perspective of convergence media using intelligent design technology. Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, 2022, Article 568690. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/2568690 (Retraction published 2023, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, 2023[1], Article 837549)
Yin, H., Zhang, Z., & Liu, Y. (2023). The exploration of integrating the midjourney artificial intelligence generated content tool into design systems to direct designers towards future-oriented innovation. Systems, 11(12), Article 566. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems11120566
Zeng, Q., Lee, M., & Eune, J. (2023). Digital design method of cultural heritage using ancient Egyptian theological totem. Heliyon, 9(5), Article e15960. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e15960
Zhou, Y., Liu, B., Zhu, Y., Yang, X., Chen, C., & Xu, J. (2023). Shifted diffusion for text-to-image generation. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 10157–10166). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR52729.2023.00979