Today is Valentine’s Day, so here to celebrate our love of historical finds is Katelyn Powell, Archaeology & Historical Studies Consultant at PHC. An alternate title for this post is “Can You Dig It?” However, this is a bad pun and we strive to provide high quality prose on this blog (but we did consider it first). Let’s hear from Katelyn now.
One of the exhibits that we are beginning to prep for is that of Biblical Archaeology, which will go up in the fall of this year. This is my area of expertise.
A short bit about me is that I have spent the last two years in graduate school at Wheaton College receiving a Master’s Degree in Biblical Archaeology. I’ve spent a couple summers in Israel excavating the site of Tel Shimron and can say for sure that it is nothing like Indiana Jones, unfortunately. It looks more like this photo (that’s me in the blue shirt on the left emptying a bucket of soil).
Needless to say, any sort of artifact that comes out of the Holy Lands is of interest to me.
Here at the Presbyterian Heritage Center we have a small collection of artifacts from the Holy Lands. Many of these artifacts are oil lamps from the Hellenistic Period (333-63 BCE) to the Byzantine Period (325-640 CE). The oil lamp displayed here is Byzantine and as you can see, it has a Latin cross at its center.
Another interesting piece we have is a fragment of cuneiform writing. This fragment was picked up by W. Raymond Cooper who served as a Captain with the British Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force during The Great War. He brought back this cuneiform fragment about 1917 and it was donated to the Presbyterian Heritage Center. In 1920, Cooper joined the faculty of Southwestern Presbyterian University, Clarksville, TN, now called Rhodes University, Memphis, TN. Professor Cooper later would become dean of students.
Today’s post written by Katelyn Powell, Archaeology & Historical Studies Consultant at PHC.
Art, Facts, and Artifacts 