Rockeologists

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(Vasara dictating) I liked the city of Axum. I thought that it was interesting because there were these large stelea. They are like big gravestones, but they’re a 1000 feet tall. They mark the tombs where important people were buried. The tombs used to have treasures, but many of these things have been stolen by now or put into other museums. The museum in Axum showed some of the treasures, jewels, and pots found in the tombs. The largest stele was built lying on the ground. The artists carved all kinds of designs and foreign words on them. They then used hundreds of elephants, thousands of men and rollers to move the huge stele into place over the tomb. Someone miscalculated the size of the base, so when they stood the huge stele up, it fell down right away. Here are pictures.

I liked going into the tombs. Rytas and I tried to dig in the tombs to find more treasures. We wanted to be archeologists, but we didn’t know exactly what that means. We found a lot of rocks in the tombs, so we decided to be “rockeologists”. We took a rock and put it against our forehead. We concentrated and the rock told us what it’s name was and whether it was once dead or alive. In another tomb, Rytas lay inside an empty rock coffin. We saw one coffin that still had a mummy inside. We didn’t actually see the mummy, but our guide showed us that if you banged on the rock coffin, it made a hollow sound. It was neat.

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