Studying History
We love history and we love reading good books, so naturally a good deal of our time is spent reading historical fiction.

Five years ago when we were studying ancient Egypt for the first time, we read two books by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. Set during the reign of Amenhotep III (c. 1411-1375 B.C.), the main character of The Golden Goblet is Ranofer, the orphaned son of a goldsmith, who discovers that Gebu, his half-brother and guardian, is part of a gang of grave robbers. Mara, Daughter of the Nile is a slave who becomes involved in a plot to overthrow Queen Hatshepsut (c. 1505-1484 B.C.) so her step-son, Thutmose III (c.1490-1435), can rule alone.

Mrs. McGraw is so good at drawing the reader into her stories that I came away from those books feeling as though I had an extensive knowledge of ancient Egyptian culture. When I'm reading good historical fiction, I have to remind myself that it is fiction!

This year in our study of history, we have come back to the benginning and will be studying ancient Egypt again in the coming weeks. Two weeks ago, the kids and I went to the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth with Anne to see the Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt exhibit. It's taken me this long to comment on it because I am silly enough to be so intimidated by Anne's excellent observations that I didn't want my mention of it to limited to "It was totally cool."

So my official observation is: I liked it. ;-)

The artifacts were beautiful and reminded me of many things we read about when we studied ancient Egypt five years ago. In The Golden Goblet, one of the goldsmiths is making a necklace for Queen Tiy set with little three dimensional golden honeybees. There were two pieces of jewelry that reminded me of this necklace. One was a necklace made of gold wire and gold beads set with about two dozen enameled gold amulets, one of which was a honeybee. The other was a bracelet that was designed a lot like the slide bracelets that were popular a few years ago, that had two 3D lions crouching like a Sphynx.

There was a life-size statue of Thutmose III, and a statue of a scribe that I have seen before in history books. There was a statue of Senefer, Queen Hatshepsut's Royal Architect, and his wife and daughter. Senefer is one of the main characters in Mara.

In spite of all the beautiful artifacts, I was a little disappointed in one thing. Most of the information given described the Egyptian religion. Very little of it was about the people represented, and I had hoped to learn more about the people and events that we'll be studying this year.

Still, it was a good experience overall. If we could go back, I'd only do one thing differently. Instead of everyone in the party wearing headphones and listening to the audio tour, I'd have only one person wearing headphones who would then share the information so we could discuss what we were seeing together.