Data Visualization Project: The Great Pyramid Builders

I have found sometimes through past experience that rather than drawing tree data (e.g. family trees) according to conventional graph drawing practices or even much fancier and specialized tree drawing algorithms, it can pay to render it in a more list-like tabular form. Featured in this blog post is one such example. It is a visualiation of ancient Egyptian family tree data from the time range of the so-called great pyramid builders. This time period included construction of such famous monuments as the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Pyramid of Khufu and the Bent Pyramid. My motivation for the dataviz project came from a visualization of the same data from The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt, a book which provides data and detailed information on the royal families throughout ancient Egyptian history. My goal was to make a visualization that could incorporate all of the detailed graph data in a way that would be easy for the viewer to trace and follow. 

My initial visualization attempts were aimed at rendering the data in a classic hierarchical fashion. However given the other things that i wished to include such as a timeline and pictures, not to mention the large umber and variety and type of relations (e.g. wife, daughter and son relations along with associated likelihoods), I found the traditional graph drawing route to be too cluttered and complicated. 

That ultimately led me to a major redesign, resulting in the final visualization below which I am quite happy with. The column-like format of the family tree data is much more compact allowing for extra space to be allocated to the pyramid pictures. The tabularized data also matches well with the vertical timeline at left. 

As for how to read the visualization, one can start by looking at the timeline tick marks. These marks run along the timeline and indicate the beginning and ending years of pharaohs' reigns, with rulers running down the central column marked by their cartouches (these are the oval shaped drawings with pharaoh names spelled out in heiroglyphs). Corresponding wives are listed to the left and daughters and sons to the right. I used brown and black lettering for names to distinguish the males from females. It should be noted that due to things such as gaps or inconsistencies in the records, not all relationships can be concluded with certainty. This leads to two additional relationship types indicated at the bottom. The one with the question mark is for uncertain relations between pharaohs and wives/daughters/sons, while the dashed line is for marking an uncertain line of descent between chronological pharaohs. And.... that's about it I think! Pretty cool huh? ^c^ 

NOTE: If you would like to view larger versions of these visualizations with close-up detail you can do so on my dataviz google+ collection: https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/kg9Bm