Write Like an Egyptian

For the Rosetta Stone project I was in the African cultures group. Fittingly enough for a project emulating the famous stone, we decided to write out our message in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics... and because that's virtually the only written language of ancient Africa that has been translated into English, so we had no choice in the matter. Now, I'm not trying to make this project sound miserable, it really ended up being a lot of fun! It was really cool to see just what challenges played into the translation of ancient texts. Follow after the jump to find out for yourself!


Part 1
 We started off by brainstorming ideas for what our cryptic message could say. I thought back to an earlier blog post I had done on the importance of writing in ancient Egyptian culture, and I remembered that in their mythology one of their gods, Thoth, wrote this "Book of the Dead" which was said to have held all of the secrets of the universe. I thought this would be a great topic to write our message on because it talked about written knowledge and was an example of written knowledge in itself! After some creative thinking (and a little luck from Wikipedia which gave us another title for the Book of the Dead) The message we decided to create said, "The Book of Coming Forth by Day, Thoth gave to Egypt." Now, this was kind of a gamble because we didn't take a quote directly from a hieroglyphic text so we really had no idea if there were symbols to represent what we wanted to say, but we figured it was worth a shot. Oh, and we decided that we wanted write our message on papyrus. That would turn into an adventure.

papyri from the Book of the Dead

We learned that it takes about six days to make papyrus on your own (or to order some online), and we certainly didn't have six days, so we would have to buy some. After class that day I hopped on the bus and went to the mall to find some papyrus... (alright you caught me, and to get the newest Call of Duty game). I looked everywhere in the mall and went to Deseret Book and found absolutely nothing, in fact you should have seen the reactions of the workers when I asked if they carried papyrus. Can't a guy buy some ancient writing mediums without being judged?! Anyways, none of us had cars so our options were fairly limited to the mall. The next day we met at Jenna's dorm to begin our translation and our inscribing. Jenna did a great job procuring some "ancient Egyptian" clay and carving tools from the BYU Bookstore as well as some really useful books from the library. We started off by scouring the books to find equivalents to the words we had designed to inscribe. This was met with very mixed success. The hieroglyphs were not ordered alphabetically by their English translation (which would have been amazing!), rather they were categorized by the first part of each symbol, which apparently meant a lot of different things because there was little rhyme or reason to the order of the symbols if you read them in English. Basically that meant we had to look through each page of the books until we found everything we needed! And boy do you find some weird stuff when you look through an entire book of hieroglyphs, just check out the symbol for giving birth! It took awhile but with our combined effort we were able to translate our message into hieroglyphics. Then Sam did an awesome job carving the symbols into the clay and we proceeded to "fire it" in our "authentic kiln" a.k.a. a Heritage Halls oven. Then Brenda added some beautiful paint to our inscriptions and the artifact was finished!

making our first artifact

finshed project!

Part 2

For the second half of the project, we had to take an artifact from another culture group, translate into our chosen ancient language, and then into English, and transfer all of that onto our cultures writing medium. Sound like a daunting task? Well it sure seemed that way to us. We received an artifact from the Greek group, which was probably the best possible scenario we could have hoped for because the ancient Greek alphabet has been preserved throughout history and resources to translate it are readily available. So thank you Dr. Burton, for unknowingly making our job pretty easy, and making the job of the group who got our artifact a horribly confusing.

the Greek artifact

Upon receiving the Greek artifact, (which happened to be crafted from the exact same "ancient BYU bookstore clay" our artifact was on) Sam immediately began translating the Greek letters into the Roman alphabet. Then in about .26 seconds if Google is to be believed, we found out that this was in fact the first line from the "Iliad," which I guess was kind of a big deal. Go figure. With our translation done we figured that this part of the project would be a piece of cake, which was not exactly the case. Our group met the following Saturday and set off to the BYU ceramic shop to get our hands on some real clay. Our artiste extraordinaire Brenda began working the clay and copying the Greek text while Sam, Jenna, and I once again began thumbing through our books of symbols in search of the equivalent hieroglyphs. This certainly proved to be the most difficult part of our process because we really were just looking in the dark hoping to stumble upon a symbol that we were looking for (again I sincerely apologize to the group had to do this in reverse). There is a method of writing phonetically with hieroglyphics, but we decided against that because it was very inefficient, both in regards to the time it would take and the space it would use. After a lot of looking and some creative substitutions, we came up with our translation. Then our hieroglyphics expert Sam went to work carving the pictures into the clay, and following that Jenna and I took on the "challenge" of inscribing the English text. Once again Brenda outdid herself painting our artifact, and after all of our combined effort, it was finally done!

By the end of the process we had created something we were all proud of, of course aesthetically, but I think more importantly because of the knowledge it contained. It was really cool to the texts of three very different writing systems be combined, and know that because of the hard work we did it all means (roughly) the same thing. This exercise also helped me to be more grateful the work that has gone on long before my time (without the internet?!) to give us access to an understanding of this ancient knowledge, and a better appreciation of the knowledge media we have now after seeing what pains ancient writers endured.

Our Rosetta Stone!!!