Wednesday 23 March 2016

Egyptian Workshop

Last Friday we had an Egyptian workshop for the day, we all came in with an ancient Egyptian costume on. First we were learning how to measure in the Egyptian way,  28 fingers = a royal cubit and 7 palms = a royal cubit and 4 fingers = a palm.
During our dancing lesson, we listened to Egyptian music, it is quite different to our English music. We had to put one hand behind our back and one just under our chest showing our palm. Our feet never left the floor - instead we shuffled around.
After this, we did a quiz on the ancient Egyptians, we had a question sheet with numerous questions on multiple topics, The answers were on boards around the hall. We discovered out scribes train for 8 years, if a family cat died that would shave off their own eyebrows, Egyptians treated cuts and wounds with mouldy bread and onions were their favourite food.
Next in our workshop, we discovered Tutankhamen's tomb might be his step mothers tomb - Nefertiti. We were handing around artefacts, we also held a sword called a khopesh, They used it to slice of enemies palms to count how many they killed, their slaves would count them one by one.
In the afternoon we learnt how to mummify some one and we did a small role play. To mummify someone you had to use your all your force and push with the end of your palm and break the nose,which allows the hook to be pushed through the nose and pull the brain back through the nose.

At the end we all were given a character trait and we marched the body around the school. And finally we put it in a sarcophagus, an Egyptian coffin.He told us that a priest cursed the door so bad luck would come to anyone who entered it, the curse included : death will come by wings, is it just a coincidence Lord Carnarvan was bitten by a mosquito a few months later after opening the tomb? .Also before the Egyptians were aloud into the after life they had to successfully go through multiple trials, the last one was the weighing of the heart, the heart was placed on one side of a set of scales and a feather was placed on the other side and if they led a bad life their heart would be heavy and go down, into the eyesight of the beast ammit where he would eat it. However, if they led a good life their heart would weigh the same as the feather and they were aloud into the after life.    

We all learned something new from our workshop and had a great day!


























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