Mohenjo Daro (National Geographic Article)

In 1911, archaeologists first visited Mohenjo Daro, an ancient ruin on the Indus River. They excavated there for a long time, but they still haven’t figured out who occupied the city. The city has no flamboyant palaces, temples, or monuments. We still aren’t sure what type of government there was. However, we do know that modesty, cleanliness, and order were preferred, that pottery and tools of copper and stone were standardized, and that there was a system of tightly controlled trade. The city was very wealthy and had high stature.

In modern Pakistan, it’s located in the Larkana district of Sindh province in Pakistan. With no evidence of kings or queens, Mohenjo Daro was most likely a city-state.

There were many prized artifacts found – for example, a miniature bronze statuette of a female, known as the dancing girl. This statuette was discovered in 1926. There were also a few stone sculptures of males found broken, which archaeologists also found interesting.

Another mystery of Mohenjo Daro is what ended the civilization. There is no evidence of any flooding destroying the city, and the city wasn’t totally abandoned either. Archaeologists are still researching today, but there was no evidence found yet.

Ancient Egypt Reflection

For our Ancient Egypt Reflection, we were supposed to write about which IB Learner Profiles we had exhibited throughout the unit as well as which Approaches to Learning Categories we showed.

For the approaches to learning categories, I think the one that I showed the most was Communication. The three points are to present information with a variety of formats, to understand how visual information communicates ideas, and to demonstrate good speaker and audience behavior. This was something I definitely did because of our end-of-unit presentations, where everybody did a presentation on something different. Also, we all drew pictures that resembled Ancient Egyptian art that had a meaning but were free to interpretation, which also falls under communication.

During the section of the unit where we were taking notes, I used problem solving and thinking skills as well. There was a lot that we learned about the Nile, where we had to recognize cause and effect relationships.

For the learner profile, there were a couple that I showed, other than communicators. I was an inquirer for a lot of the unit when we were learning about the Nile, because it was an interesting unit that I didn't really know much about.

I was a risk-taker when I did my presentation by trying to talk more to the class and do less reading, whether from cue cards or from the PowerPoint. It worked for most of the time, I only forgot what I was going to say once.

Lastly, I think the whole class demonstrated being knowledgeable this unit. We all explored different aspects of Ancient Egypt on our own, and finally at the end, everybody presented the topic that they found to be interesting.