Western Culture Research Paper

Western Culture -- Archeology and Perspective (2 paragraphs/250-300 wds)

Imagine that you were Howard Carter. Consider the following questions in a two-paragraph essay. How would you feel as you stood before the sealed door, ready to open King Tut's tomb? What would you most want to discover and understand about the past? As you entered the room that had been sealed for over 3000 years, what would you be looking for? How would you begin trying to make sense of what you found?

As I stand before a door that has been sealed for 3,000 years, preparing to enter the place that was intended to be undisturbed for all eternity, I wonder whether the people who created this monument would consider me any different from the many grave robbers who looted treasures from places like this for monetary enrichment. I know that my purpose is intellectual, historical, and anthropological, but I wonder how much that would matter to them. I suspect they would not consider the intellectual curiosity of modern man to be something that outweighed the importance of leaving the eternal resting place of Tutankhamen to remain as an entire society expected it to remain forever.

What I would most want to discover and understand about the past would be what were the beliefs of the thousands of slave laborers and engineers and craftsmen who spent their entire working lives building this monument.Did they genuinely share the beliefs of the Pharos about their afterlives or did they secretly consider themselves to be toiling for no other reason that obedience to authority and to avoid the consequences of refusing to do so? As I enter the room for the first time that any live human being has done so since 1,000 years before the birth of Christ, I would be looking for any indications of apparent meaning and significance to every object in the room, since I would assume that there was a significance to everything to those who commissioned this structure and to anybody who intended to entomb his remains along with everything he would need in the afterlife. I would be looking both for anything whose significance was obvious in context, maybe more for anything whose significance was less obvious, knowing that it had to be there for a reason.

Background to the assignment: Studying the past is like excavating an archaeological site, such as opening up an ancient tomb. That's one way of thinking of what we're doing in this course: excavating the past and trying to understand what it means for us today. For this learning activity, I want you….....