Year 9 Jewish Studies Israel Through Archaeology Course: Museum of Ancient Cultures Excursion

On Tuesday 7 March, our Year 9 Jewish Studies Elective, Israel through Archaeology class, visited a program at the Museum of Ancient Cultures, Macquarie University. It was a truly informative and engaging experience. We had access to the Ancient Civilisations Department’s museum and collection. We arrived and were immediately amazed by the range of cultural ancient artefacts shelved around us. We were met by our guide, Dr Eve Guerry, an alumnus from Emanuel School, who is an Egyptologist. Our first task was finding and recording a collection of items of various ancient cultures (including; Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Near East and Cyprus) by their practical use and symbolic meaning. We did this in groups, and it was a race to see who could fill in at least one artefact for all the given categories.

After looking around the museum we focused on the Ancient Israel exhibition where we examined ancient artefacts. We were not provided with any information and we had to make assumptions on specification like shape and size and find out what its purpose was. This completely changed the way that the excursion felt and rather than feeling like a lecture it was more like an actual scientific discovery that we had to get to the bottom of.

During the last part of the excursion we were broken up into four groups and had four different activities. The first one was a few items buried in sand and the goal was to sift out all the sand and categorise each item. This was a lot of fun because of the minute differences between each item, like the smallest change of colour in a seed and made it a big challenge. The second activity was sorting and rebuilding an ancient pot. It was interesting to find small patterns in the little shards of the ceramic that made it a challenge. The third activity was sorting coins from different eras. This was the best activity because to the naked eye they all look similar but under a microscope they had vast differences like a laurel wreath. The next activity was looking at replica artefacts and finding which script it was. Because they were exact replicas, the writing was by hand, so the little accents made it a challenge.

Throughout the whole experience, we learned much that connected to and enhanced our learning so far. At many points in the program, the guide was surprised by our class’ knowledge. The hands-on activities were definitely the main highlight. We could just see the curiosity and excitement that sparked in our peers as they held relics from mighty cultures of the past.

By Asher Vexler, Gabrielle Utian, Matthew Lowy and Mirabelle Mirvis