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Welcome to the Penn Museum blog. First launched in January 2009, the Museum blog now has over 800 posts covering a range of topics in the categories of Museum, Collection, Exhibitions, Research, and By Location. Here you’ll hear directly from our staff and Penn students about their work, research, experiences, and discoveries. To explore the Museum's other digital content, visit The Digital Penn Museum.


A Little Light Reading for the Troops

By: Amy Ellsworth

Jane Hickman, Editor of Expedition magazine and Maureen Goldsmith, from the Director’s Office at the Penn Museum, recently sent a stack of past issues of Expedition magazine to Staten Island Project Homefront. The magazines are being sent to troops stationed abroad, including Afghanistan. Staten Island Project Homefront is a non-profit organization that supports the families of deployed military troops […]

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Notes from Afghanistan: The Burning of the Koran

By: Brian Rose

I’ve just returned from Afghanistan but I wanted to write one final blog regarding the burning of the Koran by the Florida minister last month. As many of you know, that act resulted in a number of anti-American and anti-UN protests during this past weekend, some of which turned violent, with several UN personnel and […]

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Notes from Afghanistan, Day Four: Equal Education for Boys and Girls

By: Brian Rose

Thursday’s events fell into three groups. In the morning we attended the opening of a girls’ school in Ghazni that had been funded by the U.S. Embassy and implemented by the Ghazni Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in conjunction with the Ghazi Department of Women’s Affairs. There were opening speeches by the governor along with an […]

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Notes from Afghanistan, Day Three: Ancient Monuments of Ghazni

By: Brian Rose

Today was devoted exclusively to a tour of the ancient monuments of Ghazni, which stretch from perhaps as early as the Achaemenid or Persian period to the Timurid period in the early 16th century. This trip required us to travel to all sides of the city. Although we advised at the beginning of the day […]

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Notes from Afghanistan, Day Two: A Tour of Ghazni

By: Brian Rose

Early this morning we boarded a military helicopter and flew to Ghazni, nearly 150 km to the southwest of Kabul. The flight took us over the Hindu Kush mountains, which had been crossed by Alexander over 2,300 years ago. We’re staying just outside of Ghazni at a PRC (Provincial Reconstruction Center), which contains a mix […]

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Notes from Afghanistan, Day One

By: Brian Rose

C. Brian Rose, former President of the Archaeological Institute of America, shares his observations about Afghanistan during his current trip: As many of you will remember, two years ago I had the good fortune of visiting Iraq at the invitation of the US Embassy in Baghdad, and I described my impressions of the country, and […]

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Mes Aynak

By: Gabrielle Niu

With the violence and religious extremism that has indelibly shaped the contemporary world’s perception of Afghanistan, it often goes unremembered that the region for centuries flourished as a cultural crossroads of trade and Buddhism along the Silk Road. Thirty kilometers (about nineteen miles) from the Afghan capital of Kabul, under layers of unexcavated earth, lays an […]

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