The face of the past, the voice of before

With one high school class reading Dante's Inferno and another beginning research on daily life in Shakespearean England, we see our students sifting through the art and history of antiquity to see if the face of it might resemble their own. Getting down to that human level through layers of scholarship is daunting.

John Noble Wilford, in a recent New York Times piece about the public showing of the face of King Tut, writes:

The search for identifiable affinities, if only a smile, with people long ago may account for our fascination with mummies and hominid skulls. History is full of dynasties and armies, documents and artifacts, but lacks, especially in deep time, the flesh and sinew of shared humanity. There is some felt need to put a face on the past.

The depth of study and the guidance required to move our students to that level is an important aspect of our teaching; to not only map out the path of history and literature, but to allow the reality of that past to teach us as well.