Amarna

Yesterday was the opening of the Amarna (birthplace of Tut) exhibit at the Upenn Museum. It is going to be Egyptomania in Philadelphia this year, especially when the Tut exhibit comes to Franklin Institute in February. Sundays are always free during the school year at the Penn Museum, but yesterday there was all kinds of special activities, lectures for the bigger people and games and crafts for the littler ones. We arrived later in the day and spent a good deal of time waiting to get into the Amarna exhibit. It wasn't too big, which was a plus as far as I was concerned, because unless you are really interested or really knowledgeable too much can be overwhelming. I was also very glad to have my husband along who had just finished teaching a unit on Ancient Egypt and always has a way of bringing ancient artifacts to life. We found this idol with all the monkeys on it (9 to be exact) to be visually interesting and of course what is an Egypt exhibit but a chance to see really cool hieroglyphs!


After the exhibit we went up to the third floor to see if there was still time to do any games or crafts. There wasn't much, but we learned how to play Senet from a Penn freshman (she had gotten rather good at it by the end of the day) and the kids want me to get off the computer so that they can play it on-line!

Filed under:

• egypt
• history
• archaeology