Teaching with Museum Collection: Ancient Egyptian Language, Culture, and History

In this post, our guest, Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer, PhD candidate in Egyptology, shared her recent teaching experience with the Oriental Institute Museum's collection for her summer intensive high school course "Ancient Egyptian Language, Culture, and History" offered by the University of Chicago Graham School of General Studies.

Photo credit: Tom Maday

As a PhD candidate in Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, I have had the opportunity these past four years to teach a summer course for the Graham School of General Studies entitled “Ancient Egyptian Language, Culture, and History.” This course is designed to introduce junior and senior high-school students to these aspects of ancient Egyptian society.

This year, I experimented with a new addition by incorporating the permanent exhibition in the Oriental Institute Museum into my core curriculum. Working with the Institute’s Public Education and Outreach Department, I developed a museum-inspired journaling project. It is my hope that writing about objects they encounter in the museum will help my students connect to what they have learned about ancient Egypt on a deeper and more personal level.

The goal of the journaling project was to motivate students to spend more time in the galleries, to spark their interest in researching the artifacts and the history behind them, and to find a personal connection with them. This activity started with a guided tour of the Joseph and Mary Grimshaw Egyptian Gallery led by Emily Teeter, curator of the gallery. The students were asked to choose three objects from the Egyptian collection to write about. To guide my students in their reflections on the museum experience, I asked them to write down their thoughts about each object based on the following questions:

• Briefly describe the artifact. When was it used? By whom? What significance might it have had in ancient Egypt?

• What attracted you to this object? Why does it speak to you?

• Is it relevant in any way in today’s society?

The students were given two weeks to work on this project individually. Through journaling, they would be able to learn how the artifacts resonated with them, and thus gain a greater understanding of the importance of how the contributions of the ancient world still impact each of us today. Below are two samples of my students’ entries:

Hippopotamus

Faience, pigment

Dynasties 12-17, ca. 1991-1668 B.C.

By exchange with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950 

OIM 10707

"When I first saw this little guy, I did a double take. Could it be? Was there another William here? I took a picture to show to my dad, who first told me the story of the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York)’s Egyptian hippo statue. William apparently caught my grandma’s eye as well, and she liked him so much she bought her own replica from the museum shop. When my dad saw the St. Louis Art Museum’s hippo figurine...he told me the story of William and my grandma.

"I think that I really connect to the Egyptian idea of maintaining balance. Both during the school year and here, learning how to juggle schoolwork, friends, and sleep presents more of a challenge for me than any of the three in and of themselves. The symbolic breaking of the figures’ legs to ward off chaos in the afterlife reminds me that I am by no means the first one to try to control my surroundings.

"Although we may not use statuettes, we still desperately try to ward off chaos today. We have air conditioning to control the chaos of weather, computers to control the chaos of research, and chemicals to control the chaos of the crops. The idea of maintaining balance definitely still resonates today.” (Elyse Mack)

Loaf of Bread

New Kingdom or later, Dynasties 18-30, 14^th-4^th centuries B.C. 

By exchange with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950 

OIM 18321

“I love food, so seeing an actual thing that everyday people would have eaten was fascinating. Being from the New Kingdom or later on (Dynasties 18-30), this bread is probably pretty stale now, but still provides amazing insight into the everyday lives of the people who lived so long ago. I could not help but think of all of the people whose work went into making just this one loaf of bread. There would be the farmers who grew the grain, the potters who made the bread molds, and the people who prepared the dough and baked it. As demonstrated by the statues in a neighboring case in the Oriental Institute Museum, there were many specific steps that someone would have to do to make bread. The everyday person’s life depended on bread as a staple to their diet, and to the ’bakers‘ their livelihood did as well.

"Not only bread, but the grain used to make it was vital to Egyptian society. Used as payment, grain, that would have grown in the same field as that shown here, would have been used to pay workers or mercenaries.

Again, I was astounded by the preservation exhibited here.” (Julia Masterman)

Since this was a new experiment for me, I was unsure how this activity would be received by the students at the beginning. However, after seeing the work my students produced, and the many insightful and well-researched entries on such a wide variety of ancient Near Eastern artifacts, it was eye-opening for me. Many of them were especially astounded to realize that issues in our modern society were relevant thousands of years ago, such as the ways foreigners are stereotyped, the crucial role of propaganda for rulers to establish their control, or the various ways people anticipate and prepare for death. Mummies will indeed never cease to fascinate us!


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About the Author: Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer
 

Photo Credit: Tom Maday

Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer is a PhD candidate in Egyptology in the NELC Department of the University of Chicago. She was also guest curator at the Oriental Institute for the special exhibit Between Heaven & Earth: Birds in Ancient Egypt (Oct. 2012-July 2013). After studying chemical engineering in France and completing a MA in Greek and Latin in Vermont, she is now able to combine her passion for birds and her academic interest in ancient Egypt. Her dissertation is entitled “The Exploitation of Avian Resources in Ancient Egypt: A Socio-Economic Study.”