Archaeology of the Middle East postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

In the British Museum's Lachish room there is a small scene that most visitors walk past. A family sits on an ox-cart leaving the conquered city, with a child perched among their bundles. I first noticed it in my second year, and it became the starting point for my undergraduate dissertation. I wanted to know what Sennacherib's palace sculptors chose to show about the people being moved, and what that choice might tell us about how the Assyrian court wanted deportation to be understood.

Working on the dissertation taught me how much depends on looking closely and reading carefully. I made repeated visits to draw sections of the reliefs, recording the posture, clothing and possessions of the deportees, and compared what I saw with published drawings and photographs. I argued that the reliefs present deportees as orderly and intact family groups, distinct from the executed defenders. This suggests the images were concerned with the managed transfer of labour as well as punishment. I was careful not to treat the reliefs as a straightforward record of events. Much of my final chapter weighed the propaganda function of the palace setting against the textual accounts of the campaign. My supervisor's main criticism was that I relied too heavily on English translations of the annals, and I agreed. That criticism is one reason I want to study at postgraduate level, where I can work more directly with the region's languages and material.

My degree also gave me practical grounding. A module in archaeological GIS showed me how settlement survey data can be mapped and questioned, and I enjoyed building a distribution map of excavated sites for a coursework exercise. Pottery handling sessions taught me to describe fabric and form consistently. I spent two weeks on a training excavation in Britain, where I learned single-context recording and how slow and unglamorous careful trowelling is. I liked that more than I expected. Reading Marc Van De Mieroop's A History of the Ancient Near East gave me a chronological frame. Roger Matthews's The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: Theories and Approaches made me think about how survey, excavation and interpretation have shaped what the field believes it knows.

Since graduating I have worked early shifts in a supermarket bakery. It is repetitive work, but it has made me reliable and quick, and I have trained three new colleagues on the ovens and the production schedule. My afternoons are free, and I have used them to attend evening Arabic classes, now in my second year. I can read simple texts and hold basic conversations. I know I am far from fluent, but I want to keep building the language alongside the archaeology rather than treating it as an afterthought. I also help run a Saturday chess club for children at our local library. Mostly that means setting up boards, keeping a ladder of results and explaining the same opening principles patiently many times over.

I am now looking for a postgraduate course that will widen my focus beyond palace imagery to the wider archaeology of the Middle East. I am interested in settlement, landscape and the everyday material of households, and in how imperial power appeared outside royal capitals. I would like to test whether the questions I asked of the Lachish reliefs can be asked of excavated evidence for resettled communities. I bring careful observation, practical recording experience, steady habits from paid work and a growing ability in Arabic. I hope to develop these into the skills needed for independent research in the region.