When I want to watch a movie instead of the news and my favorite crime show, I always get drawn to movies/documentaries about ancient Egypt. I’m fascinated by Pharoahs, the Valley of the Kings and the Pyramids at Giza. And of course, the Nile River! You know, the great Pharoah Ramses II had red hair. Cool!

One of my favorite movies is The Ten Commandments, which is about the great Exodus of the Hebrew slaves from ancient Egypt. And of course I had to watch The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. I had even gone to one of the major museums in Chicago years ago when I still lived there, to see the King Tut (child Pharoah Tutankhamun) exhibit. This makes me wonder that if we indeed have had previous lives, that one of mine would have been in ancient Egypt.

Egypt was an advanced society in ancient times. Women had some rights, aka could own property etc. Watching these documentaries is so fascinating and educational. World renowned Egyptologists doing their thing. So much to translate through hieroglyphics, drawings of people, treasures buried with Pharoahs, etc. I wonder if they will ever be able to uncover and/or translate everything from ancient Egypt. So much stuff!

Another culture I have always been drawn to is the Renaissance period of music. Love early music and the composers. Instruments…harpsichord, lute, etc. The beauty of the simplistic melodies and the expertise needed to perform them artistically. I always wonder if the composers from the different periods of music would be awed at how expert their music sounds in this day and age. According to our knowledge of music history, orchestras were small in those days and not necessarily well disciplined. I would love to have heard Renaissance and then Baroque orchestras back in the day.

Going back in time and doing research into cultural or musical periods, or whatever you want to research from ancient times, is so fascinating. We look at life well before we were born and see how exactly people lived and what they invented. We also learn what they ate, what they wore, how they built their houses, in short, like a ginormous ancient time capsule.

And something else, especially in ancient Egypt, how many thousands of years their structures have lasted. Many are a bit of a mess but many are intact. Stone lasts!

As far as music from hundreds of years ago, it lasts to this day. Original manuscripts have been found with some interesting notation as opposed to how we write music in current times. But we can definitely see what the composer had in mind. Fascinating!

And regarding cultural looks, every country seems to have just beautiful traditional clothing! Egypt certainly did. Look at Polish costumes as well as other Eastern European countries, then Greece. How about China, India and beautiful flamenco dancers from Spain. So much traditional beauty in this world.

And then let’s talk about traditional food from around the world. Oy vey! That alone would be another blog post. Chicago has the annual “Taste of Chicago” which celebrates all the different cultural foods in the city. Italian Village, Greek Town…Mediterranean foods which are not only legendary but healthy as well.

So I do love to see cultural stuff from around the world. I also love to see family trees and old pictures from my own family heritage from Poland. Interesting stuff indeed! But it makes us think. It makes us wonder how our relatives lived and survived especially during world wars and awful governments! It also gives us, at least me, determination to keep up the way they did. Educate myself, forge my own way, survive, have faith, don’t quit or look back. Keep moving forward. Invent something too if the situation arises. How else did previous cultures get to where they did and leave their inventions for us to study and improve upon?!

Now I’m not sure they had pie years ago, haha, but they had other goodies! That should be my next research project…the beginnings of pie. Cheers!

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