Reflect

Through my blog posts about the Twelve Olympian Gods, I have learned a lot about many of them. I’ve learned that for each god there are many different stories told about them. I’ve also learned how people in the ancient world worshipped these gods and how they believed in them. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art I learned much about the god Zeus and how he was portrayed to humans in the ancient world.
My expectations at first for this blog assignment were to just learn a few things about the gods. Then when I read into the background of each god, I was then surprised about the stories that were behind these gods and how they all tie up to each other. Honestly after reading all these stories about the gods and everything, it just made me think of how gullible and wrong these people in the ancient world were of believing in these gods. Spending their whole life worshiping these gods that are not even real just stunned me.
After having done my blog on the gods, the word “classical” for me basically means ancient. Artifacts or stories dating back to 1,000 years and beyond all seem classical to me. It seems classical to me because that was the ancient world back then.
If I had unlimited resources and time to do more information on my topic then I would probably visit Greece. I would visit Greece because that’s where these gods were worshiped and there would be a lot of information there. I would want to visit the Coliseum and the Parthenon because those were temples for the gods and there would be a lot of information on them.
I do believe that this assignment did enhance my experience in the Classical World because it taught me about the Twelve Olympian Gods that were worshiped in the Classical World. I thought that the blogging experience helped me a lot in learning because it was much more fun than just writing a research paper. Having to do a blog made it more exciting and caught my attention more. The most valuable lesson that I learned from this blogging experience is that I learned a lot about the Twelve Olympian Gods. It also taught me how to blog things which I can defiantly use in other classes in high school or in college.

Zeus artifact

The artifact that I chose at the museum is a sculpture of Zeus’s head. Zeus is seen with a wavy beard and a wavy head hair. It seems that a piece of his nose and beard is missing probably being of misuse or old age. The age of this statue is either third or second century B.C. Also its civilization is Greek, Hellenistic. The artist is unknown but was just a statue to how Zeus was portrayed. There is also some brown spots on the statue which could be from old age as well.

You can tell that this is a classic piece of art because you can tell on the statue that the artist used chipping tools to create it and it shows how people in that time period portrayed Zeus. People today still make statues or drawings of Zeus that all look similar to this statue. We took their ideas of what Zeus looked like. Also many artists today use the same types of methods to making statues as this artist did to make this statue.

At the Metropolitan Museum, the statue of Zeus that I chose was lined up with many other statues of people. They had statues of Aristotle and Socrates right beside the statue of Zeus. Statues of Poseidon and Athena were also next to the statue of Zeus. I saw that Zeus and Poseidon were portrayed very similar and almost looked the same. I can tell that the museum has tried to show different views on what people back then looked like. For example, I saw two statues of Aristotle that had many differences between them. The artifacts that are being portrayed help me know that its whatever the statues of Zeus may have many other different looks to it.

Some things that I learned after the trip to the museum that I didn’t know before was that many of the statues of the gods who were guys were not that different. For example, Zeus and Poseidon looked very similar by the statues. I also learned that the artifacts in each section were very similar to one another.

Some preconceptions that were confirmed by my visit were that the statues of all the gods were all similar. Since know one has really seen them, I thought that many of the gods looked very similar in the face. After looking at the statues it confirmed it. Some preconceptions that changed were that I thought that the statues were in good condition but actually many of them had pieces missing and many had brown spots.