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.

Reflections Related to the Roman Rosetta

In order to not bombard the blog with an excessive number of posts about my group's experience with the Rosetta Project, I have combined my three reflections into one very long blog post... Hopefully, it's not too long. (Ok, it is really long. That's because it's three posts of varying length in one, but it's more organized this way and less obnoxious, I think.)

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:

Rosetta Project: My Maya Akkadian experience (Part 1 and 2)

First, this post is a compilation of both the first half and second half of my Rosetta learning experience. Some parts are labelled and specifically discuss on part of the project. Others are mixed.

Akkadian is tedious. When I found out we were assigned Akkadian, I found some basic information online regarding the grammar and symbols Source, but not enough to make sense of the lines and triangles on the clay tablet. Thus, I enlisted the help of Dr. Stratford, a BYU Professor and expert in Akkadian. I set up a meeting with him, and Erin met with him as I was unable to go at the time that worked for him. He provided as valuable information, informing us that the group had written the text in the wrong direction and gave us a guide of the symbols, which helped us to efficiently translate the cuneiform Akkadian, to the syllables, to English when we met as a group that night. These symbols then represent other syllables that have to be translated to English. Did I mention tedious? I wish we had included the syllabic translation of Akkadian on our Rosetta Stone, because it added another complicated dimension. The second half of the project Holland, Erin, Mike and I met at Mike's apartment to put all of our information together and resources together into the lovely "Rosetta Stone" pictured above.

I learned many things during this experience:

•  Make sure your source is accurate. If not, it will add additional complications.


• It fascinates me that these lines and triangles actually communicate something as it just looks like geometric configurations to me.  However, if these triangles are misplaced, it doesn't actually mean anything. If you are unfamiliar with the language, it can take a while to realize this. 

We not only had to deal with an unfamiliar language, but also with the mistakes of the group who wrote Akkadian. (This is understandable as it was a learning experience for them too.) Erin shared with us that Dr. Stratford had told her that the cuneiform text should be written horizontally–left to right. However, the Akkadian group had written their word vertically, top to bottom. . We wrote it correctly on our Rosetta Stone. I wonder how many mistakes and misinterpretations have been made throughout history. . . ?

Handle Your Medium with Care: 
The tablet broke while in class moments after we got it. Thankfully we had the modern technology of photographs and the internet so that we did not have to carry our broken slab of clay around throughout the entire translation process and risk losing this valuable information. This photo was an effective way to share the tablet so that we could all work on the translation process simultaneously in different places. Imagine how little information we would have today if the mediums were as fragile as this piece of clay. . .

This is the Akkadian clay tablet we received to translate. Notice the faint crack on the right hand side.
Yes, it broke into two pieces. Thankfully, it was still legible. Lesson learned: Some mediums need to be handled with more care than others.

First Response to Rosetta Project

As a group we were struggling to come up with an appropriate message to write on our clay tablet. I had to start thinking critically about linguistic issues that arose, and I was ever so glad when our group decided to consult with an expert. It worked so beautifully for my oral interview, and we actually ended up consulting with the same Professor that I interviewed.

However, as intriguing as some of those linguistic concepts were, most of my musings came along with the assignment I was designated for the group effort. It was my job to procure the clay. The current frigid conditions discouraged me from attempting to dig for clay, not to mention BYU grounds crew might be a little upset. Also, the clay I might find would be far from the quality we wanted for this project. So I got in my car and ventured forth to find myself some clay. Michaels, here I come. A quick question to a friendly employee and 13 dollars later, I had myself some high quality, air hardened clay.

But through what process acquired clay in early Mesopotamia? I have thought about this question a lot in the last two days. It is possible that every time somebody needed a tablet that they just went outside, dug up some clay, mixed it up, and made a tablet. However, in a business driven society such as the Sumerians, I figure that there were probably merchants that made their living as clay/tablet suppliers.

Writing, books, printing, and all the associated processes can have major economic ripples. Thinking about the modern process of printing a book was illuminating. Books are made out of paper. Paper is made in a mill, which employs many workers. Paper is made of wood, which is logged by other companies, which also employs many workers. Other companies make their tools. Authors write books. They use commercial products such as computers, word processing software, pens, and pencils. Editors, publishing houses, promoters, bookstores, online retailers, and Oprah all get into the mix. While some of these things could only happen today, many of these things were applicable as early as there has been writing.

The economic effects of Written and Printed Knowledge are far-reaching and impressive. I’d be interested to talk to my Econ professor more about this next semester.