What 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
Category Archives: Kids: Literature
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.
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.”
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 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
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