🌏 🇲🇲 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Ancient Pyu Cities of Myanmar
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Bob O'Hara riverhouses.org
Visit a World Heritage Site and learn some homeschool history and geography along the way. This week: the Ancient Pyu Cities of Myanmar.
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The River Houses
Myanmar (Burma) in southern Asia is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes with your students today learning about one of Myanmar’s World Heritage Sites: the Ancient Pyu City-States.

The ancient Pyu culture flourished for more than a thousand years in the south-Asian region that is today Myanmar:

The Pyu Ancient Cities provide the earliest testimony of the introduction of Buddhism into Southeast Asia almost two thousand years ago and the attendant economic, socio-political and cultural transformations which resulted in the rise of the first, largest, and longest-lived urbanized settlements of the region up until the 9th century. The Pyu showed a striking capacity to assimilate Indic influences and swiftly move into a significant degree of re-invention. They created a special form of urbanization, the city of extended urban format, which subsequently influenced urbanization in most of mainland Southeast Asia. These earliest Buddhist city-states played a seminal role in the process of transmitting the literary, architectural, and ritual traditions of Pali-based Buddhism to other societies in the sub-region where they continue to be practiced up to the present.

Halin, Beikthano, and Sri Ksetra together as a Serial Property jointly testify to the several aspects of the development of this new model of urban settlement for the Southeast Asian region. Together the three cities provide evidence for the entire sequence and range of Pyu urban transformation from ca. 2nd century BCE to the 9th century CE, Buddhist monastic communities, distinctive mortuary practice, skilful water management, and long distant trade. At all three Pyu Ancient City sites, the irrigated landscape of the Pyu era is still impacting on the rural livelihoods of the modern population, while the religious monuments continue to be venerated by Buddhist pilgrims from throughout the region. (World Heritage Centre #1444)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Ancient Pyu Cities on the World Heritage Centre’s website.

World Heritage Sites are cultural or natural landmarks of international significance, selected by their home countries and recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. More than a thousand such sites have been designated in over 160 countries, and we feature one every Wednesday, drawn from one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week. You can find a complete list of World Heritage Sites online at the World Heritage Centre’s website and in Wikipedia.

The World Heritage Centre also has a free and comprehensive World Heritage education kit for teachers, as well as a wonderful full-color wall map of World Heritage Sites, available for the cost of shipping. Why not add them both to your own homeschool library. 🗺

What world treasures are you and your students exploring in your homeschool this Leo Term? 🇲🇲

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Homeschool Geography posts featuring cultural and natural sites of international importance. Print your own copy of our River Houses World Heritage Calendar and follow along with us as we tour the planet, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌐

❡ Print this little lesson: Down at the bottom of this post you'll find a special "Print" button that will let you create a neat and easy-to-read copy of this little lesson, and it will even let you edit and delete sections you don't want or need (such as individual images or footnotes). Give it a try today! 🖨

❡ Books in the running brooks: You can always turn to your River Houses almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia for more information about any of our countries-of-the-week. The almanac has a lengthy section with detailed profiles of all the nations of the world; the endpapers of the atlas are indexes that will show you where all of the individual national and regional maps may be found; the history encyclopedia has a comprehensive collection of national histories in an appendix; and you can find additional illustrations, flags, and other mentions through the indexes in each of these volumes. For an ideal little lesson, just write the name of the Weekly World Heritage Site on your homeschool bulletin board, find its location in your atlas, read the WHC's brief description aloud, look at a picture or two, and you're done. Over the course of the year, without even realizing it, your students will absorb a wealth of new historical, geographical, and cultural information. 📚

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

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