What a way to start the new term with our Egyptian Day! We met Ani, an Egyptian scribe who was put in charge of a mummification of the chief embalmer of the village. He followed a set of instructions which involved him ‘carefully’ removing each of the organs and placing them in canopic jars, leaving the body to dehydrate in natron salt and performing various rituals to allow the body safe passage to the afterlife.
We loved handling a multitude of different artefacts which had been found in Ancient Egypt and used our skills as Egyptologists to work out how they could be used to tell us more about the era. We learnt many things from what kind of shoes were worn to why the scarab beetle was so important to Egyptians. We learnt about different pharaohs from Cleopatra to Rameses II, different Gods and saw the kind of jewellery which may have been worn.
As Ani was a scribe, he was in charge of training us to become new Egyptian scribes. We used reed pens and ink and wrote on papyrus. We carefully copied the hieroglyphs to write an important message! We liked that we did not have to use spaces or any punctuation!
We had great fun designing our new Egyptian cities, including Memphis, Alexandria, Cairo and Luxor being careful to choose buildings and features which would allow our cities to thrive without overspending . We then watched as our cities worked their way through world events. Had we included enough religious buildings or statues to protect our city? Did we have enough crops or meat to trade? Would our cities survive and which was the best one? We gained extra points for our careful designs.
Finally, we had the opportunity of playing the Egyptian games of Senet and Mancala. Senet is a board game in which you had to get your pieces to the end avoiding the traps or being sent back to the start. Mancala was a strategy game using beads in cups. You took out the beads from a cup and had to drop a single bead into the following cups. If you finished with one bead over your ‘mancala’ you kept them. The aim of the game was to collect more beads in your mancala than your opponent.
We had a brilliant day, we hope you enjoy looking at our pictures.
Stay safe with fireworks this weekend and have a lovely time.
Year 4 team