Part One: Creating the Artifact
In creating wax tablets for the Rosetta Project, my group (see also the posts by Marc Wein (part 2) and Alyssa Cardon; Madison Grant will have one up, too; I am blatantly stealing pictures from their posts as well as the Asians who took more pictures of out tablet...) had the advantage of not needing to chisel out stone, but the creation process was a bit more involved than some of the others.
The final product should have looked something like this. Essentially, we have a wooden folder with wax on the inner right that we would write on. There's really two major differences between our wax tablet and the one that the Romans would have used. First, the Romans would have probably used beeswax, which we were unsuccessful at finding. Instead, we used what wax we could find, scented wax melts, which was good because my apartment smelled nice afterwards, but this provided a few challenges for us... Second, we weren't able to find anything at all authentic for the binding of the codex, so we just have single tablets that have been removed from a codex. (Come on, we weren't going to give another group a whole codex to translate! We don't want to give away that many of Ancient Rome's secrets!)This is what our final product ended up looking like:
Pretty close, I think.
We started by going to the craft store and purchasing two wooden frames to use as the backing for our wax tablets (one smaller for our message and one larger for our Rosetta Tablet). Unable to find beeswax anywhere, we also purchased wax melts (for the spirit of the beeswax, we looked for a honey-flavored wax, but the only one that we could find smelled REALLY bad...) We went to my apartment, where we began construction of our tablets.
At the simplest, we had to do two things: melt the wax onto our tablets and write our message in it. Easier said than done. Sadly, housing rules prohibited the creation of an authentic way to melt wax. Instead, we melted it in a frying pan. This was the least problematic of our attempts to change the temperature of the wax (more on that later...) We poured the melted wax onto our tablets. Task one complete, right? Well, sort of...
We made a couple of mistakes while working with our stylus in the wax. Fortunately, we were working with a more forgiving medium. If we'd been able to find beeswax, we could have just smeared out the mistake and re-written it. Using non-bees wax, however, we had to reheat the wax to make it soft enough to rub out. Once again restrained by housing guidelines, we got the bright idea of microwaving the tablet. Bad idea. The wax kind of seeped through the backing of our frame into the cork that was on the other side, which was very willing to soak it up (see the bottom left corner of the tablet, where the wax is missing). We realized that if we didn't want to run out of wax (which we didn't), we would need to limit our microwaving. We avoided microwaving our tablet again, and we finished our Latin inscription.
The larger tablet should have been a walk in the park because we weren't writing anything on it yet, right? Wrong again. As we realized that the cork on the back of our tablets was slowly seeping up the wax while it still wasn't hardened, we decided to freeze the larger tablet to better preserve the wax we had. When we pulled it out of the freezer minutes later, the entire thing was cracked. We took our knife and scraped all the wax off of the larger tablet, put it back into the frying pan, and remelted it. Beeswax would have been MUCH easier to use. We poured the re-melted wax back onto the larger tablet and let it cool and harden on its own this time.
While we waited, we played the ancient Roman game of Jenga. Unsurprisingly, I lost. :P
Once the wax had hardened on the larger tablet, we took a knife and carved out holes on the side of each frame so that it was like a "page" taken out of a codex, even if it wasn't bound to anything. Voila, we were done.
We were pretty satisfied with our final product. We had a bit of a scare every time we tried to use modern technology, which was a bit humbling. (Stupid housing rules saying we can't have an open flame... I'm pretty sure the Romans had open flames in THEIR houses, and it's not like Rome had a problem with burning down or anything...)
Our friends to the far east are probably actually glad that we used regular wax instead of beeswax. The advantage of the beeswax is that it allowed you to erase your mistakes, but if our Asian friends accidentally rubbed against the writing, the secrets of Ancient Rome would be lost FOREVER! So using regular wax helped them with not destroying ancient history and subsequently not failing the project.
Part Two: Translating
When
we received our strange scroll from the Near East with two different languages on opposite sides (Hebrew & Arabic, the Arabic side is the one shown to the right) of it, we knew there would be a very limited group of people in Provo that could aid us with the translation. There aren't too many Jews or Arabs walking around BYU's campus... Perusing our only option we could see, Alyssa went to talk to a professor of Middle Eastern languages. (Actually, she went to try to talk to every professor- you can read about that on her blog.) We already knew that the two messages said generally the same thing and guessed that they had something to do with a common religious text (meaning most likely the first part of the Old Testament). He helped her come up with a translation for the Hebrew text. While a little less English-structured than we would have hoped, it made some sense... sort of... The professor's view of the Arabic text was a little less flattering...We ended up translating the Hebrew into "When his Lord hear the words of his wife saying something like 'make me your servant or slave,' he became angry." Yes, "something like." This was a bit confusing for us and also caused problems when translating into Latin, but we worked it out. We did a little researching and concluded that the text was most likely supposed to be the Hebrew equivalent of Genesis 39:19, which reads in the King James Version "And it came to pass, when his master heard the words of his wife, which she spake unto him, saying 'After this manner did thy servant to me' that his wrath was kindled."
For the Latin, we called my little brother, who's taking AP Latin, where he reads Virgil's works like the Aeneid in the original Latin. It took a bit of two-way communication to clarify what exactly the Latin forms should be. I took one semester of Latin in high school, so I knew some of the various cases and some words, but I couldn't make a sentence from English by far. Talking with my brother really showed me how little I knew about Latin. Of course, I have become well-acquainted with this feeling: I experience it every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9:00 to 10:00 because of my French class. However, I learned several things such as in Latin, the word equivalent to "like" is reserved for use in similes, and you can't use it to say that one thing is "something like" something else. In fact, apparently "something" is too broad a word for Latin; a more specific word is required. This rather befuddled me because the whole point of our word "something" is to be unspecific! I'm glad that French has a simple "comme" that functions very similar to the English "like" or "as" and that French has "quelque chose" which is literally "some thing." Even though the French language was not involved in the project at all, I gained an appreciation for what French I did know because of it. I guess I'd really taken for granted how easily I could translate French into English (ok, so that makes me sound way better at French than I actually am, but I couldn't think of another way to say it).
Because the first tablet contained only 12 words, Maddie was the only one in the group to write on it. However, I got to write the English on our Rosetta Tablet (thankfully, someone else was eager to write the Hebrew; I'm certain I would have messed up horribly). It was much easier than I expected. Though the wax had "hardened," it was still very easy to carve into. Unsurprisingly, the most difficult letter to create was "e" because it is a small letter that still requires a closed area and is almost entirely curve-created. What did surprise me was the easiness of creating the curve-dominated "s" letter in the wax. It was also a little irritating and a little amusing at the same time that most of the enclosed areas on my letters like "b" and "d" actually fell out, leaving blank spaces in their place. I found myself becoming more comfortable with the medium as I wrote, gradually picking up speed once I got going.
Finally, we got all four things we wanted to write on the tablet: the Hebrew script, the English translation we got with the help of the Hebrew professor, the Latin translation we got with the help of my brother, and the English King James Version of Genesis 39:19, the verse whose equivalent in the Torah and Qur'an was what we thought the Middle Eastern group had given us on their scroll. We hoped that we had gotten good translations and waited anxiously for the presentations Tuesday, when we hoped we would be told our translation was a good one.
Part 3: The Presentation
As we were the last group whose work would be shown, we watched anxiously as the other groups presented their work. We were awed at Mayan symbols, stone-carved mediums, and colorful Egyptian hieroglyphs. When the Middle Easterners finished talking about their translation from Egyptian, we descended from the balcony to present our findings. We were quite relieved when the Middle Easterners said that our translation of the Hebrew text was pretty close and that what they had written down on the scroll was in fact the Hebrew and Arabic versions of Genesis 39:19. The professors seemed satisfied with our work, and we trooped back up to the balcony.
When the Asian group descended to the stage to show their work with translating our Latin text, we were rather satisfied with their translation as well. They translated our Latin text almost perfectly into "Do not trust the horse, Trojans. Whatever it is, I fear the Danaans, even when bringing gifts." The translation typically used in the English version of the Aeneid contains two minor differences: first, it uses "Greeks" instead of "Danaans," and second, it uses "bearing" instead of "bringing," but both of these terms are relatively interchangeable. They brought up how there wasn't a word for "Danaans" in Chinese. As the English translation of the Aeneid usually goes with "Greeks" instead of "Danaans," the fact that they recognized it could go either way was good enough. This passage was Laocoon's last words in the Aeneid, warning the Trojans about the wooden horse before being killed by serpents sent by Minerva.
Learning Outcomes:
I felt like I should re-emphasize these at the end of my post. I think the best way to discuss the learning outcomes specifically is to just list them because this project related completely to all of them.
1) History
Ok, this one's pretty obvious as we were dealing with ancient languages. One thing that I particularly enjoyed about the project was that my civilization (Rome) existed at the same time as and interacted with the other civilizations whose writings it received (Hebrew and Islamic civilization). In fact, as Rome controlled Israel, it was cool to think about the fact that there would have been Romans in Rome who really were reading Hebrew! I felt like this helped me appreciate even more how translation is an actual process that really is used outside of a classroom. Even better, we've been talking in class about the Bible's translations: Jesus spoke Aramaic, which is related to Hebrew, so as we were translating a verse from Genesis from Hebrew into Latin, we were like the early Christian scholars who translated the Bible! (Just without any Greek) Of course, I'm also glad people much more skilled than myself were doing this for the Bible centuries ago... We would have some RIDICULOUS doctrines in Christianity if I was in charge of the translation.
2) Knowledge Institutions
Carrying over from the idea of my group as a collection of scholars translating the Bible, there is an immediate institution of knowledge that comes to mind. That is, of course, organized religion, specifically the Catholic Church. However, before thinking of this, I instead thought of myself as a worker in a Roman library trying to decipher ancient texts. It just goes to show that institutions of knowledge are often doing the same thing(s) at the same time- whether it be for cooperation or competition.
3) Communicating Knowledge
Ok, I feel like I don't even need to say anything about this one, but I will briefly. The entire project revolved around the communication of knowledge! Specifically, it was the communication of knowledge from one civilization/language to another, through different mediums. The final product of the project, the Rosetta Tablet [or other medium] is in of itself a communication of knowledge as it allows for translation!
4) Knowledge Skills
We developed the skill of translating languages but also of writing in new mediums, both of which were challenging. For me and my group, the first was definitely the more difficult and the second more fun, but both are meaningful skills of knowledge.
5) Sharing Knowledge
Essentially, this project was also a sharing of knowledge. First, we recorded a piece of knowledge. Then, we gave that knowledge to someone else. Finally, we received a piece of knowledge from someone else and translated it! The group-oriented style of the project also helped with the sharing knowledge aspect because we shared knowledge within the group as well. For example, in my group, Alyssa shared her knowledge of Hebrew that she had acquired from a professor, I shared my knowledge of Latin that I acquired from my brother, etc. We were on both ends of the sharing aspect throughout the project!
Overall, I really enjoyed the project. Though it was undoubtedly stressful at times, it was a lot of fun to create and then write in Roman wax tablets. I feel like someone in an art class should do that for a creative project where they have to explore art in an unusual medium and draw a picture in the wax! If I was in an art class (which would never happen) and had this assignment, I would! :)
Lastly, I'd like to thank my fellow Roman citizens, Marc, Maddie, and Alyssa, for their great work and coordination during this project! They're amazing!
YAY for translations!
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