Deutsch 102 Stunde 38

Deutsch 102 Stunde 38

Outline plan:

• Today’s class will consist of flexible review of Kapitel 10 Vokabeln und Grammatik.
• During a “normal” semester, today’s class would meet im Kelsey Museum! We would ask you to print and review this Handout to prepare for today’s class activities!
• If you are interested (and if the museum is open for visitors), find a classmate or another German student to go with you to the Museum, ask the museum staff for help finding the exhibits, and do the activities on the handout together. At each station in the museum, your instructor would have briefly simulated an interactive museum tour in German. You would then have interacted with classmates as prompted by the handout. Here is an outline (in English) of what your instructor would have told you:
  • For the Karanis exhibit, try to figure out what some of the objects in the main exhibit were used for (e.g. a window, a desk, a chair, a lamp…), and then walk around and open the drawers to find e.g. shoes (the colorful ones were for mummies), toys (e.g. dice, a toy horse), and some very dry food, all well-preserved by the sand under which successive layers of Karanis were buried. The excavations of Karanis in the 1920s and 1930s were led by a UofM professor of Latin and Literature (!). Can you guess his name?
  • For Mumien, Masken & Götter, look at the big mummy case. Its former occupant, the priest Djehutymose, tweets for the Kelsey Museum, announcing events and asking for help finding his body, which was not found with the case. The text is from the Book of the Dead. The top half shows the sky goddess Nut. Can you see how/where she is shown giving birth to the sun each day, and eating it at the end of the day? To the right of the mummy case are canopic jars in which the organs were preserved. The brain was pulled out through the nose or a cut in the neck and discarded, as it was considered useless. The heart was left in the body as it was thought to be the seat of intelligence and memory and so crucial to retain in the afterlife. A child mummy is further back. A CT scan at the UM hospital found it to be a 4 year old child with some serious injuries, and 6 fingers on one hand, a trait associated with the Ptolemaic royal family. Look at the display to the right of the child mummy and open the drawers to find some Egyptian (gold), Greek (marble), and Roman (wood/plaster) mummy masks.
  • Go up the stairs to find the Roman baths. The baths were a center of social life. Besides washing/swimming, you could exercise, socialize and conduct business, listen to lectures, eat, get a massage, or visit a library. Hot air under the floor heated the rooms and the water; the cold baths were further from the central fire. Instead of soap, the Romans applied olive oil and then scraped it off with the dirt and sweat; you can see the scraper in the exhibit case. The bathroom consisted of long benches with holes over a trough of running water where people sat and chatted; the wealthier guests could pay to use a communal sponge to clean themselves afterwards. Women and men bathed in separate sections, or at separate times.
  • Around the corner from the Roman bath exhibit is a stunningly vivid reproduction of a (dining?) room from the “Villa of Mysteries” in Pompeii, showing scenes from the cult of Dionysus. You can have fun trying to guess what is happening in these scenes, which were perhaps meant to inspire conversation over dinner.