The Freschetta Stone

So, for our civilization project over in the Greece Group, we got together and discussed how we wanted to do our artifact and Rosetta thing.  Our first thought was that the Greeks, like many other ancient cultures in the Mediterranean area, frequently wrote on papyrus.  It seemed easy enough, it is a simple and common medium, but when we tried to get our hands on papyrus, we immediately started running into difficulties.  First, we tried online, but the fastest reliable shipment method we could find would have taken a full four days (by which time we needed to be translating our new artifact), so we searched to see if there were any local stores that might have it, to no avail.  We considered stone, which was a popular medium at certain Greek time periods, but discarded that idea because of the difficulty of writing into that medium.

Our Rosetta thing and our received artifact, displayed against
The Freschetta box we used to preserve the "Stone"

As a sidenote, it made me think of how glad I am that we live in a culture where we have a choice of mediums.  I can imagine how weird this would look to someone from one of these ancient cultures to hear us discussing what we wanted to write these things down on, and dismissing things that they used and probably didn’t think twice about as being too difficult.

Finally, we arrived at a sort of compromise; clay!  Easier to write in than stone, easier to get than authentic papyrus, and just as authentic as any other medium for our culture.  So, we got together after class, piled in my car, and away we went to the Hobby Lobby!  We found some clay that was the color and type that we wanted, bought a few samples, then we went back to campus.  We decided to use the famous first line of the Odyssey, “Tell of the storm-tossed man, O Muse, who wandered far…” which we divided up amongst ourselves, one or two words each, then we each took our turn inscribing our words in the clay, and voilà, one authentic Greek Artifact!

As I’m sure was the case with most groups, the real fun started with the Rosetta-thing.  We received our artifact from the Indo-European group, a palm frond with some writing on it.

Phone picture--what did I do before my Blackberry?
Oh, and, yes, that is upside down.  Woops.

I took a picture of it on my phone, went home, and started looking up different texts.  I had taken the picture upside down, however, so for the first twenty minutes or so I had no luck whatsoever even finding candidate languages, so I went to the different blogs of the different members of the other group, and almost immediately I realized that I had been looking at this script all wrong.  I turned my phone the other way around, and suddenly it looked a lot like those languages I had been seeing online.  So, I compared a few of them, and I felt fairly confident that this language was Devanagari.

Monday, we got together as a group in the Wilkinson Center, and started researching Devanagari.  We were able to find a few similar characters, but the syntax was very involved, and we were nowhere near a solution after probably a half hour of searching.  When we realized that that was going nowhere, we started looking up Sanskrit scripture on a hunch, and thankfully the script we were looking for was in the first hymn of the first book of one of the books, namely the Rig Veda.  Once we had found the text, the rest of the translation was relatively easy.

The last thing we needed to do was to make the Rosetta-thing.  We decided that we needed to mold the clay first, because there was not enough room for all that we needed to write.  Blaine started the process while we were finishing up the translation, dipping the clay into a water bottle to soften it, then molding it over some paper towels to keep the table dry-ish.  Once the translation was done, we all joined in and helped mold.  It went fairly smoothly, except for an incident with a spilled water bottle.  :-s

Finished product!  Translated, Transcribed, and...Fired!

Anyway, we finished the molding, then three of us each took one language to transcribe.  I had the job of writing the English, which was nice because I knew the characters, but also hard because it required me to think more carefully than I am used to about forming the characters legibly.  When we had finished that, we passed the Rosetta thing on to Blaine to “fire” in his oven.  Molded with our own hands; that’s what a job well done feels like.

(Oh, for those wondering, Ted and I started calling it the “Freschetta Stone” because we used a box from the Freschetta restaurant in the Wilk to transport it without it getting broken or destroyed. :-)  )