Ancient Olympia digital recreation and research materials

From July to November 2000, the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, presented the exhibition, '1000 years of the Olympic games: treasures of ancient Greece', as part of a cultural festival complementing the 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Sydney.

This was a creative collaboration with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, which generously lent the precious artefacts displayed in the exhibition.

A popular immersive component of the exhibition, on the website and made available as a CD-ROM to all schools in NSW was 'Virtual Olympia' - a navigable digital recreation of ancient Olympia. It was produced for the technologies of the time and stopped functioning adequately on more modern computers, so we removed it from the website.

However, in response to enquiries from the public, we have decided to make available that material which is still able to be viewed on current computers - videos of the digital recreation (below - these are no longer navigable but still provide a good idea of what ancient Olympia would have been like); and pdf documents (at right).

The following pdf documents provide more information about the rich history and archaeology of ancient Olympia, the Olympic Games, the digital reconstruction and the project:

Exhibition essay: then and now
Olympic Games program
History of excavations at Olympia
The Temple of Zeus at Olympia
The pediments of the Temple of Zeus
The metopes of the Temple of Zeus
Artemision Zeus
The digital reconstruction of Olympia, 3D Zeus
Glossary
Bibliography

Virtual Olympia - Introduction	Southern colonnade to the temple | of Zeus
The Council House	Inside the temple of Zeus - part 1
Inside the temple of Zeus - part 2	Inside the temple of Zeus - part 3
To the Stadium	The Phillipian via the Treasuries part 1
The Phillipian via the Treasuries part 2	The Phillipian via the Treasuries part 3