Mummies: Secrets from the Tomb

I love history. And my children are quite interested in happenings of the past, too, so it’s turning out that we make a pretty good team of explorers. So this year as part of our social studies, I purchased the Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer. Story of the World comes in four volumes: Ancient Times, The Middle Ages, Early Modern Times, and the Modern Age. We started at the beginning with Ancient times and kicked things off with cavemen.

Recently though, we’ve been finishing up our lessons about Ancient Egypt and the Pharaohs. I happened to check the website for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles for some information about educational programs and found that they were getting ready to close the traveling exhibit Mummies: Secrets from the Tomb. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take the kids to see that. What a great opportunity to connect what they are learning to real life.

The Mummies exhibit features over 20 mummies. Some people, some animals. Some children, some adults. Some were wrapped, some were in coffins. They had CT scans of the mummies so you could see what was wrapped inside the casing of a few of the mummies. My son was particularly intrigued by the mummy of a child who was wrapped with a few objects like a gourd and a figurine.

Some of the interesting things we learned in our exploration of mummies during and after our trip include:

1. Peru actually began the practice of mummification about 2000 years prior to Egypt. While I thought mummies were pretty specific to Egypt, Peru was at it long before they were.
2. The mummies are wrapped differently. In Egypt, they wrap the body long ways, with arms crossed over the chest and place the body in a coffin. In Peru the bodies are bundled into the fetal position and wrapped in more of a sack-like form. Then, false heads are made and placed on top of the mummified bodies.
3. Animals that were sacrificed to the gods were also mummified.

We really enjoyed the mummy exhibit and when we got home I began searching for other events. I was excited to find a few others happening in Southern California.

Muzeo: You’ve got just a few more days to get over to Muzeo in Anaheim for the King Tut exhibit. They have replicas of 131 artifacts that were retrieved from the young Pharaoh’s tomb. The exhibit is scheduled to close on January 31^st.

Bowers Museum: Mummies of the World opens on March 19^th. While I’m not positive if this is the same exhibit that was at the Natural History Museum, it may be, but I can’t find any information identifying it either way. Keeping my eyes open though in case it’s something we haven’t seen! Also, the Bowers Kidseum has great programs including arts and crafts and Junior Archaeology.

We love Story of the World and there are lots of great activities in the Activity Book to help us learn along the way. We also have several other books that we used to explore mummies and ancient Egypt. Here are some fun titles you might like to share with your kids (click on the image for more information):