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:

Counting Before and After

Dr. Burton got really excited about numeral systems in class today, and while many of us mentioned the images of the counting systems for our civilizations, no one created has a post about it (actually, it probably wasn't ever directly related to what we were talking about, but whatever). Since we all have at least a little familiarity with Roman numerals, and because numbers were important to the Romans, I figured I'd do a brief post on them.

Now that we write, we can draw horribly inaccurate pictures!

As I mentioned in my post about the transition from an oral culture to a written culture in Rome, the Empire itself had a very important use for writing, especially as Rome tried to manage its empire. One thing that helped Rome not only manage its empire but also expand it was Roman cartography, which was very much related to writing.

Roman Plates

I really enjoyed going to the Special Collections yesterday. Seeing all the items there was really cool, especially the hand-made illustrated book (I don't remember whether it was actually a Bible or not) from France. Out of all the things we looked at, there was one that stood out to me as very different: the Roman military/citizenship document. As Rome is my focus civilization, I figured I'd write a short post on the plates.

From Podium to Pen in Rome

So, we had a nice little break with King Benjamin and his teaching charity, one of the most important ideas of Christianity. Now... back to bloodthirsty and pagan Romans!

The Roman Empire serves as an excellent example of how a culture can change from being oral to being written. In a previous post, I mentioned how Virgil's Aeneid, published in 19 BC, showed how Roman culture was still principally oral. In his day, there would have been Romans who could tell the entire story of the Aeneas's journey in the Aeneid much like bards would have told stories such as Beowulf. Within half a century, however, this had changed. When Ovid published his Metamorphoses in 8 AD, there were still people who could orally tell the stories that he had published. Very few people, however, (if any other than Ovid himself) could tell all of these stories. Within the decade(s) after Metamorphoses was published, Rome had a very much written culture. (While Ovid's works, Metamorphoses in particular, played a role in this shift, I should clarify that I do not mean Ovid himself was solely responsible, for that would be a very generous assertion on his behalf.)

A Dead Language (?)

Latin is often seen as the epitome of language failing to endure through the ages. The phrase "dead language" in English refers primarily to Latin even though English isn't a Latinate language. Observing and analyzing the Roman Empire's preservation and acquisition of language is therefore very different from doing the same for some other languages which are still spoken today relatively similar to how they were spoken in the past, such as Hebrew or Chinese, because there is no general Latin speaking population anywhere in the world today and nobody on the entire planet will tell you that their first language is Latin. So because Latin is the poster child for "dead languages," I'm going to take a slightly different approach on my post...