If You Don't Write It, It Didn't Happen

Our recent Rosetta Stone project left me with a dusty taste in my mouth.  Granted, that is probably because I spent the better part of two days carving messages into stone, and the residual dust got everywhere.  As I both carved in stone, and watched others do so, I had significant amounts of time to reflect on the lives of those people who previously would have done the same thing.  As it turns out, carving stone is tedious (who knew?) and takes a while to complete.  You want to do it right the first time, and you need to know what you're going to say, before you say it.  As our group was, in the majority, representing cultures where the only written records are monuments that have weathered millenia, it was interesting for us to decide on what we were going to write that would have been important enough to put on a stone monument.



Other members of my group have already posted interesting comments about how we picked a language, but I want to add that we had significant disagreements as to whether or not potential phrases had significant enough value to place in stone.  Once we had picked our phrase, and translated it into Ogham, we commenced chiseling stone.  We had quite a fright when, at one point, we cracked a big chunk off of our rock.  Fortunately, it was due to practicing chiseling on the back of the stone, and wasn't actually near our final product.

With our stone carved, we came to class (nervous because the appointed guardian of the rock was late that day) ready to wow all with our medium, and then have an interesting experience learning about someone else's choice of medium.  Here's where the story gets interesting.  You see, instead of having us swap mediums with another group, our professors decided to leave us with our original choice of medium, but take and represent a phrase from another group's language.  Now, Ogham looks like the following picture:

All straight lines, and easy to chisel into stone.  The languages we were required to put on our second stone included Ogham, and English, both of which were not too scary to contemplate.  However, we also were required to carve in this language:

Not so easy.



Because we had people in my group that were willing to translate the text we had received into all three languages, I took on the role of copyist, and tried to figure out how we were going to manage getting Mayan Hieroglyphics into our stone tablet.  (As it turns out, the original Mayan stuff was also carved in stone and looked like this:

so we got an unanticipated authentic experience out of this)

It was immediately obvious to me that a hammer and chisel, while being the authentic tools for the job, would not suffice in the comparably minuscule timeline of 4 days that we were allotted to finish the project.  [ENTER POWER TOOLS]

Fortunately, my in-laws were coming to town, and they are the sort of people who own just about any variety of drill, saw, welder, or grinder that you could wish for.  I asked nicely, and my brother-in-law allowed me to borrow his Dremel on condition that I buy my own bits.  (Thanks Bro)

With this tool in hand, and a group meeting at 8:30 AM planned, I headed to Lowes at 6:30 AM on saturday to find diamond tipped masonry bits.  I was not disappointed, and left with my prize for under $10.00.

The group meeting went well.  We had a skilled artisan in our group, who transferred all the Mayan to our rock by the means of our highly authentic, Mayan class, mechanical pencil.  A couple of times she, and by proxy the rest of us, had the odd experience of erasing stone.  Once the transcription was complete, we all took turns carving with the Dremel which, in spite of its 10,000 rpm, still took about 4 hours to do the job.

Between a few of us carving the English phrase over another hour, and our local expert in Ogham (Diane) who carved the entire phrase in Ogham in about 20 minutes, we ended up with our final product (see below):

Dusty haired, rock in hand, we returned to class, on Tuesday, and presented our trophy to our professors and fellow students.  Overall it was an interesting experience, and it left me wondering about history in a new light.  Our efforts to write with a hammer and chisel were childishly authentic.  We had an obvious speedup when we used the power tools to do the same job.  There are many tools that allow us to accomplish tasks today that would have taken lifetimes to accomplish by ancient means.  Take for example this blog post, with pictures discussing three languages, and a play-by-play of a weekend's activities.  I wrote it all down, edited some for coherency sake, looked up several words in a dictionary, and effectively made a copy for everyone on the Internet by posting it here.  Doing that in stone would have been impossible to contemplate, let alone undertake.  Expanding this metaphor of a blog post into the abstract clouds of every occupation improved or replaced by technology, we have collectively saved craftsmen whole lifetimes.  The biggest question remaining is what are we to do with all the extra time?