This month in Harvard history
Feb. 29, 1672 – President Charles Chauncy dies in office. Feb. 10, 1853 – Jared Sparks steps down as President; James Walker, Class of 1814, immediately succeeds him to become Harvard’s 18th...
View ArticleTake a lunch break to ancient Israel
The Semitic Museum is sponsoring a free, docent-led tour of “The Houses of Ancient Israel: Domestic, Royal, Divine” today (March 8) at 12:15 p.m. The museum, located at 6 Divinity Ave., maintains...
View ArticleFree tour through ancient times
The Semitic Museum will sponsor a docent-led tour of its “Ancient Egypt: Magic and the Afterlife” and “Cyprus, the Cesnola Collection” exhibits on April 12 at 12:15 p.m. The event is free and open to...
View ArticleIn brief
Chorus auditions this weekend The 150-voice Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus will hold auditions for all voice parts this Saturday (Sept. 15 from 1 to 5 p.m.) and Sunday (Sept. 16 from 6 to 10 p.m.). The...
View ArticleIn brief
HARVARD BRIDGE PROGRAM, IOP RECOGNIZE 23 NEW CITIZENS The Harvard Bridge to Learning and Literacy Program, and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics (IOP) recognized 23 Harvard employees...
View ArticleIn brief
HARVARD-AFFILIATED MEEI NAMED ONE OF AMERICA’S BEST HOSPITALS The 2008 edition of America’s Best Hospitals, published by U.S. News & World Report, assigned Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts Eye and...
View ArticleIn brief
HARVARD-AFFILIATED STUDY RUNS IN JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY A new, Harvard-affiliated study on effective community partnerships (titled “Staying at the Table: Building Sustainable...
View ArticleSemitic Museum extends docent deadline
The Semitic Museum is currently seeking volunteer docents for the coming year. Docents will provide guided tours to school groups and the general public on the museum’s collection of archaeology of...
View ArticleIn brief
JOINT CENTER ACCEPTING GRAMLICH FELLOWSHIP APPLICATIONS The Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) is accepting applications for the Edward M. Gramlich Fellowship in Community and Economic...
View ArticleIsraelite bread-making discussion at the Semitic Museum
On Thursday (April 23), the Semitic Museum will host half-hour discussions at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. (appropriate for grades three through six) on how ancient Israelites made bread — from planting to...
View ArticleSemitic Museum to host tour of ‘The Houses of Ancient Israel’
The Semitic Museum will host a lunchtime tour of “The Houses of Ancient Israel: Domestic, Royal, Divine” on May 21 at 12:15 p.m., offering a view of life in an ancient Near Eastern agricultural...
View ArticleClik here to view.
History shines through the glass
“All glass is beautiful,” Belgian researcher Patrick Degryse said, gently turning a delicate, Roman-era vessel, its bluish sheen glowing under the fluorescent lights of the Semitic Museum’s basement...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The future of archaeology
When he first stumbled on the field that would become his life’s work, Peter Der Manuelian was a fourth-grader in suburban Boston. The object of his attention was 5,000 years old. He was transfixed by...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Baking in the details
In the basement of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, Alex Douglas looked at the pieces of baked clay in front of him, teasing out how they fit together into a small tablet, thousands of years old and marked...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From Iraq and back, via 9/11 and Harvard
A group of 4,000-year-old clay tablets that survived looting, confiscation by U.S. customs officials, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks is shedding light on what everyday life was like in ancient Iraq as...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Desert mystery
There’s a mystery in the Syrian desert shielded by the conflict tearing apart the Middle Eastern nation. In 2009, archaeologist Robert Mason of the Royal Ontario Museum was at work at an ancient...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An ancient statue, re-created
As part of a repair job 3,300 years in the making, Harvard’s Semitic Museum is seeking to undo some of the destruction wrought when Assyrians smashed the ancient city of Nuzi in modern-day Iraq,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A director for Museums of Science and Culture
Dean Michael D. Smith of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) announced today that Jane Pickering has been named executive director of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Pickering is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A different take on Tut
In recent years, DNA analysis has shed light on the parents of Egypt’s most famous pharaoh, the boy king Tutankhamun, known to the world as King Tut. Genetic investigation identified his father as...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The watchword is innovation
This is the third of four reports echoing key themes of The Harvard Campaign, examining what the University is accomplishing in those areas. Innovation? That was not always one of Harvard’s goals....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The queen and the sculptor
For those of us aging fast, it is nice to know that one the most beautiful faces in the world is more than 3,300 years old. That face is on the bust of Queen Nefertiti, the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
‘Wonderful things,’ indeed
Britain’s Lord Carnavon asked famed archaeologist Howard Carter what he saw as he first peered into King Tut’s tomb. “Wonderful things,” Carter supposedly replied. Carter would eventually catalog...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sampling the scholar’s life
When he was in high school, Ozdemir Vayisoglu ’16 dug into the past, uncovering buried secrets at an archaeological site in his native Turkey. This summer, he was digging again. But instead of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Take a lunch break to ancient Israel
The Semitic Museum is sponsoring a free, docent-led tour of “The Houses of Ancient Israel: Domestic, Royal, Divine” on March 8 at 12:15 p.m. The museum, located at 6 Divinity Ave., maintains...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Exhibit at Harvard Semitic Museum casts new light on ancient epics
In the earliest days of civilization, walls told stories. Spreading for miles on the distant and now ghostly palaces of Mesopotamia, bas-reliefs narrated epic tales of kings wielding power through war...
View ArticleClik here to view.
‘Dream Stela’ of Ancient Egypt inspires Harvard project
Between the paws of the six-story Great Sphinx in Giza, a slab of hieroglyphs tells the story of how King Thutmose IV dreamed his destiny. The eight-foot Dream Stela was erected in 1401 B.C., 1,000...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Semitic Museum is renamed Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East
The Harvard Semitic Museum has changed its name to the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE) to better “reflect its core mission in clearer terms,” said Director Peter Der Manuelian. “We...
View Article