Daryna Lapitskaya The Oriental Institute Museum Have you ever thought about the ancient times and

who would you be back then? What if you happen to be a pharaoh, what kind of life would you live? How about a slave; how miserable your surviving would be? By visiting The Oriental Institute Museum you might have an idea of ancient everyday life because it provides you with the common for that time tools and house accessories as well as with the great masterpieces of art related to the Bible, such as the Dead Sea Scroll. Its amazing how living in the twenty first century you can still see and touch unbelievably old objects that were made and used by ancient civilizations. When you walk in the museum, you feel yourself being taken thousands years back in the ancient Near East region; by looking at all the exhibits you can imagine people walking on a handmade patterned carpet wearing sandals made of tanned leather, drinking out of ceramic jugs and cups enjoying the beauty of the baked clay vessel decorated with animals from a folk story Amazingly, the museum even has an imitation of the grave where you can see a real dead persons skeleton with bunch of jugs he was buried with. There are also pieces that reflect the warfare themes; you can picture how ancient people fought and defend themselves back then; moreover many military items reflect the position and the importance of the worships to gods in the war. Ancient people worshipped hundreds of gods; they could be represented in animals, human, or mixed forms, most often a human body with an animal head. There are also bunch of examples of the amulets that were worn to provide good luck and longevity. You can also find huge statues of animals that make you wonder how those people were capable of building this kind of size statues without any modern technologies.

There are a lot of huge statues and monuments; however, the piece that captures my attention was a tiny fragment of the Dead Sea Scroll. Its one of the few scroll fragments on permanent display in North America that is dated back to 50 BC- 50 AC. The scroll preserves part of the non-biblical Hebrew text. In the small fragment, the poet first praises the virtues of Torah study and humility, and then describes the contrary vices; translation: 1). your soul 2). your [hear]t, and in the teach[ing] 3). you will [re]joice upon it and 4). [with] humble heart beseech Him 5). and haughtiness of eyes, uncircumcised heart 6). haughtiness of heart and anger, anger Its amazing how people who were probably poor and were barely surviving looking for food and shelter already cared about such things as soul and heart. They already somehow connected eyes with the heart, just like we do too by saying that eyes are our mirrors of our soul/heart. Ancient people realized as well the needs of education and the place of Gods in your heart for a better religious life. They were also dealing with similar feeling such as anger and others; they realized the power of emotions and the consequences those can lead to. Ancient people engraved all that in the permanent scrolls to show the importance and tell people how to live following the rules. We use a lot of commonly used expressions and phrases without thinking that people thousand years ago used the similar ones and possible our ancestors were the ones who came up with those ideas and made them common. By what archeologists found and what we see in the Oriental Institute Museum we can tell that life in the ancient Near East was similar to nowadays; people dressed up by wearing accessories, decorated their houses, used similar tools in their everyday life, believed in Gods and worried about the condition of their hearts and souls.