BEIRUT: Second-year high school students from Sagesse High School and the School Without Walls in Washington, D.C engaged Wednesday in an online discussion about ancient Mesopotamia.
Over twenty youth between the ages of 16 and 17 assembled in front of a smart board in one of Sagesse’s classrooms and listened, dressed in their navy blue and grey school uniforms, to a lecture broadcast online by a State Department expert on the history of ancient civilizations.
“Mesopotamia is said to be the cradle of civilization” Catherine Foster, an archaeologist specializing in the ancient Middle East, told students in both Lebanon and Washington. “Modern day cultures have a foundation in Mesopotamia, weather through its rudimentary court system or the way they derived time.”
Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is otherwise known as modern day Iraq.
“This conversation is very timely with regard to everything happening in Iraq today,” Social Studies Department Head at Sagesse Dany Kfouri said, in reference to the country’s deteriorating security situation after years of internal conflict and the recent emergence of ISIS in the region. “It is a way of linking the present to the past.”
A gallery of images flashed on the screen showing archeological remains of the ancient civilization in Iraq. “The environment in Iraq is not suitable to the preservation of these structures” Foster said.
Wednesday’s session was the first of a series of online conversations about ancient civilizations with high school students from both Lebanon and the U.S. The initiative was organized by The U.S Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs alongside PBS Learning Media, an online educational resource library.
“While militants and fighters are tearing things down in Iraq, we are here trying to build something,” Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut Robin Holzhauer said. “And by looking at Iraq’s past we know what things to preserve and what mistakes to avoid.”
One student, Sebastian al-Khoury, 16, seemed comfortable with the subject. He spent all of last year studying Mesopotamia, he said. The material covered central aspects of the ancient civilization such as the code of Hammurabi - a well-preserved Babylonian law text, which is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. “We know a lot about the topic, it would embarrassing if the students in Washington didn’t know how to answer questions as well as us,” he said with a smirk.
Proving the class’s strong grasp of the topic, Sagesse student Cibelle Ghoul, 16, approached the microphone and asked about the influence of the Hammurabi code on U.S. laws, which Foster lauded for its insight in to the legacy left by the ancient law.
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