Yesterday afternoon we had a lovely visit from the Primary 3 class of Inverurie Market Place School, who had come into Aberdeen to take part in our Ancient Egypt Experience Day. The class spent the morning with King’s Museum, finding out some amazing facts about death on the Nile, and then came to us for our Discovering Ancient Egypt workshop. We had just received some new equipment for this workshop so we were very excited to see how it would fit in.
The class’s task was to think about how Victorian Egyptologists would tell all their friends and colleagues back in Britain about the amazing things they had seen on their Egyptian explorations. Sometimes they could bring things back, but what if it was too big? The pupils discussed in groups how this could happen 150 years ago without the help of all the digital gadgets we have today. One of the suggestions was drawing a picture which is exactly what one of our Egyptologists did. The class got to see an example of how Reverend George Tomlinson recorded an amazing sarcophagus engraving. Then their challenge was to record what they saw to take the information back to school.
We tried out different methods, not just drawing. Our new equipment was six metal plates with the Egyptian image engraved into them.
The class used some of them to make rubbings with paper and crayons.
The pupils also used modelling dough to recreate the “squeeze” method of reproducing an engraving. George used wet paper to create his squeezes, letting them dry in the hot Egyptian sun, but the dough served as a useful replacement in our chilly climate!
The class also looked at some notebooks from our collection which contain translations of some gruesome Ancient Egyptian medicine recipes. One of them has lizard dung and pigs’ blood in it! The pupils used their own imaginations to come up with some equally disgusting cures for illnesses.
Thank you for visiting Primary 3 and trying out our new engravings! We will be using them from now on for our Discovering Ancient Egypt workshop.
If you would like to bring your class to the Special Collections Centre for a school workshop, email scc.learning@abdn.ac.uk or phone (01224) 273047 or (01224) 273048.
Posted by: Lynsey
UoA Collections 