How to make your own bronze age artefacts for learning and imaginative play

This is going to be a post outlining how we made our own Bronze Age Artefacts and will be mainly pictures with a few annotations. We have been learning about Tubal-Cain and Jubal in our Mystery of History lessons. They are only mentioned once in the Bible:

His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. As for Zillah, she also gave birth to Tubal-cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and iron (Gen 4:21)

It is the mention of bronze and iron that I was interested in. The bronze age spanned from 3300BC to 1200BC. The historic dates pertaining to Jubal and Tubal-Cain are between 3500BC and 3000BC (between Adam and Noah).

I decided it might be fun for the girls to try their hands at ~~metallurgy~~ making some dress up toy pipe/lyre/tools. They could then use them in their imaginary play and also for their end of volume 1 presentation. These were super easy to make, using things around the house.

Bronze Age Artefacts: Musical Instruments

Flute

Collect string, old pens/pencils, gaffe tape in metallic colours and some card:

The twistables were perfect for making a flute. First empty out the insides:

Cover the empty tube in bronze gaffe tape, tucking in the ends. Mark some holes:

Lyre

Gather same supplies as above. I downloaded a picture to keep me on the straight and narrow:

Wrap card around pen/pencil, adding extra at the bottom to give it its triangular shape. Tape up. I used packaging tape because I had a lot – use whatever tape you like 🙂

Wrap another (smaller) pen/pencil in same tape and fix it to the upper end of the first pen:

Do the same to the third and fix to both free ends. You will now have ~~three pens covered in tape~~ a basic lyre shape:

Begin creating the strings of the lyre, knotting at each end and then covering in metallic gaffe tape:

Continue until you have the required number of strings. Work the metallic gaffe tape around the whole lyre to neaten the overall appearance of the lyre:

Bronze Age Artefacts: Tools

Axe/hammer

Gather the same supplies as before, this time cutting out some cardboard axe and hammer ends:

Wrap a piece of card around one of the pencils/pens:

Wrap bronze metallic gaffe tape around it. This is one of the handles:

For the second handle, tape together two pens, making sure to go round twice to smooth out the indentations. This is your smaller tool handle:

Cover the tool ends in the silver coloured gaffe tape:

Using the tape attach the heads to the handles until they are firm. They should be secure enough to be banged and handled quite roughly without breaking. Here are the underside of each tool:

Obviously, for a tidier look take a bit more time or do it without the children 😉

We managed to get the front side looking good:

I was really pleased with these, because they look good, are cheap to make and are really very sturdy:

I’ll be sharing all the other activities we did during our lesson on Jubal and Tubal-Cain next week sometime. For more Mystery of History posts click on the links below:

Planning Mystery of History Lessons

Lesson 1: Creation

Lesson 2: Adam and Eve