It may seem strange, a technology reporter doing a piece on the 2,000-year-old Egyptian Temple of Dendur. Strange, until you see this section. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s MediaLab, which explores ways of using new technology to enhance visits, recently unveiled its “Color the Temple” project, a project that projects colors onto the hieroglyphics through digital mapping technology, allowing us to see them as they likely looked immediately after they were created.

“It’s not that we don’t know they had color, but to really see something three-dimensional, large, come alive with some of its original color is quite striking and it gives you a lot of new ideas and a new understanding of what ancient people were seeing and how they were drawn to these little gems like that,” said Marsha Hill of Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There are three hypotheses shown. The first, what the museum feels certain was originally painted, then two other versions adding what they believe was also likely there based on what they found on similar Egyptian temples from the same time period.

Now those on the tech team that made this happen say it took about two years, two years to get the colors just right, two years to get perfectly inside the lines. But the same team says moving forward as it considers other panels, they believe now that they have the basics down they can cut that two years down to about one.

 “So they worked with photography department to make sure the calibration of the colors was just right, they worked with the Egyptian department to make sure it matched and it was calibrated to make sure it matched the beige of the stone right now, the colors were taking into account that it was going to be projected on the relief of the temple and not on a white wall or a projection screen for instance," said Marco Castro Cosio of Met MediaLab.

Going forward, the museum says it’s looking into not only projecting onto more sections of the temple but possibly even using augmented reality so that you could look through your phone and have it color in, so to speak, some of the hieroglyphics.