Category Archives: Kids: Culture

Throwback Thursday! Perfectly Preserved Petroglyphs

Siberian petroglyphs. Image taken by Sergei Alkin.

Siberian petroglyphs. Image taken by Sergei Alkin.

It is said “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but some pictures are worth much more than that. Some ancient pictures are worth a thousand years of history and knowledge. These images tell stories about our ancestors and they help us to understand our past.

Recently, a fascinating find in Siberia was revealed for the first time and it provides a 4,000-year-old window into the ancient past. When scientists were alerted to its presence three years ago, they decided to keep it a secret in order to protect the site while they studied and cataloged its treasures. Now, for the first time, its location has been made public and our eager eyes can feast upon the perfectly preserved art. Continue reading

Happy Hanukkah from AntiquityNOW: Children’s Crafts for the Festival of Lights

IMG_0862For Jews around the world Hanukkah is a season of family and remembrance, and what better way to celebrate the joy and miracle of this ancient holiday than seeing the ingenuity of students from the Hollis Hills Jewish Center Nursery School in Queens, New York.

Students at the school range from ages 18 months through five years old. The slideshow below illustrates the work of children from three classes. The Lego menorah was created by a student and her father.  The children were learning about the story of the Maccabees and the miracle of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, where a small vessel of olive oil burned in the menorah for eight days at the Holy Temple. The pictures of the Hebrew letters Nun, Gimmel, Hey and Shin are translated “Great Miracle Happened There” (in Israel “Here” is substituted). Continue reading

KIDS’ BLOG! Write Your Own Tale of Terror!

book-758978_640What words best describe Halloween? Spooky? Scary? Terrifying? Like many of us, you probably like to be scared. Well, this Halloween we’re giving you the chance to really strut your creative stuff. You get to write your own tale of terror. But we at AntiquityNOW are giving you a challenge. We’re providing you the beginnings and endings of stories, which means you pick one beginning and one ending to bookend your story. And—drum roll—you must include an element of ancient history in your story. Just look around at today’s books and movies. How many have to do with time travel to an ancient place, an artifact that has magical powers or a mystery that had its origins in Ancient Egypt or Rome or Mesopotamia? The distant past is filled with possibilities for storytelling. Continue reading

Fact or Fiction? Ancient Chewing Gum

Fact or Fiction curly and roundWhether it’s bubblegum, mint, cinnamon or fruity flavors, chewing gum is one of the world’s most ubiquitous habits with nearly 100,000 tons consumed per year.

Did you know that chewing gum is almost 5oo years old and used to be made out of tree leaves?

Fact or Fiction?

HOVER YOUR CURSOR HERE TO SEE THE ANSWER

*Click here to read more about the history of chewing gum. And click here to read our Kids’ Blog version.

KIDS’ BLOG! Picture This: Pictograms and Petroglyphs and the Stories They Tell

An example of Aboriginal hand stencil rock art.

An example of Aboriginal hand stencil rock art.

Update! This post was originally published on July 23rd, 2013. In the post below we explore the ancient history of rock art and how we’re still using pictograms to communicate today. Recently, ancient petroglyphs have been back in the news with the discovery of an ancient Aboriginal site in a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Researchers say the site is tens of thousands of years old and has probably been dismissed by locals as graffiti.[1] Actually, it is kind of like ancient graffiti and it helps us see into the past and get a glimpse of what life was like for the ancient people living in the area. The art is made up of hand stencils of things that were a part of everyday life, such as “eels, a spearhead and a crescent-shaped moon.”[2] The images are a particularly advanced form of aboriginal hand stencils in which numerous hands combine to form a particular shape.[3] There’s a waterhole nearby and the petroglyphs are on a rock overhang so the artists were probably living in this spot, using the rock for shelter and fishing out of the waterhole. Because of the size of the hands, researchers have concluded that this site was created by women and children.[4] Continue reading

KIDS’ BLOG! Take a Glimpse into the Lives of the Ancient Judeans and Make Your Own Piece of History

A cuneiform tablet similar to the ones on display in the Bible Lands Museum.

A cuneiform tablet similar to the ones on display in the Bible Lands Museum.

Have you ever sat down at the end of a long day and written in your diary? Or maybe you just updated your Facebook status and shared what you ate for dinner or how you were feeling after a difficult day at school. What if ancient people from thousands of years ago had done the same thing? We could learn so much about the way people lived, how they felt, what they did. These are the kinds of things archaeologists get to study when they are lucky enough to find written records and testimonies from ancient times. Continue reading

KIDS’ BLOG! Proverbs II: Timeless Words and the Soul of a People

An ancient Viking rune symbolizing fertility and new beginnings. In modern times, it is often used as a symbol for the saying "Where there's a will, there's a way."

An ancient Viking rune symbolizing fertility and new beginnings. In modern times, it is often used as a symbol for the saying “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

In Part I, we discovered how proverbs, sayings that carry a message or truth, seem to be a part of every culture going back millennia. In the oral tradition, before writing could delve deeply into the world of ideas, societies needed ways to instruct people as to how they had to behave. Proverbs arose as an effective way to do just that. Their wise and often witty words and images embodied the values of a culture. And while cultural values can be quite complex, proverbs were popular because they conveyed that idea, that value, that moral in a distinctive and memorable way. Continue reading

KIDS’ BLOG! Proverbs I: Timeless Words and the Soul of a People

Book of French Proverbs from 1845.

Book of French proverbs published in 1845.

Every culture has a story to tell, and that story is told in many ways. Artifacts, legal records, letters, journals, art, music, dress, even the detritus of daily life uncover the ways of a people. Values and mores are realized through rituals, religions, oral and written histories, monuments and palaces, and many more touchstones of culture. In particular, language and the expressive arts have produced some remarkable observations of lives lived long ago. Continue reading

KIDS’ BLOG! Do You Love Being Fashionable? So Did Our Ancient Ancestors!

Image courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, Image courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, Image courtesy of artur84 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of imagerymajestic, artur84 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

UPDATE! This post was originally published on September 27, 2013. In the post below we bring you fascinating information about an ancient sweater found last year in Norway that is remarkably similar to some of the fashions we wear today. It is so important for us to study ancient clothing and textiles like the Norwegian sweater because the information we learn gives us clues to how our ancestors lived and it teaches us that we have a lot in common with those who came before us. Recently, another exciting discovery about ancient clothing was made on the island of Cyprus at the archaeological site of Erimi-Laonin tou Porakou. A workshop complex was excavated which appears to have been used for “textiles and dyeing.”[1] Continue reading