And That's a Wrap- Rosetta Stone

When I considered "Reinventing Knowledge" as part of my class schedule this semester I felt like I had some idea of the typical things that I would be asked to do. You know, the usual readings and some reports and other regular assignments. I can say almost with ease that most of the things that we have been asked to do this semester have been quite the complete opposite than what I had imagined. Starting with blogging on a regular basis all the way to scribing Cuneiform. That's a great thing! I feel that just as we have been and are studying and researching transitions within knowledge and mediums and languages, at the same time we ourselves are going through a transition of sorts in how we go about learning. At least that's how I feel about the recent events and things that have been done.

As it was talked about in class, it was evident to see that each group had different struggles and things that were particularly difficult for them due to the dynamics of their civilization and language. For some it was translating the phrase they received from another group (Egyptians and this one), others it was translating the phrase back into their own language (this was our challenge and Africans) and others it was the medium in which they wrote on (The Ogham Group).

As I mentioned above, the aspect that was most difficult for us would definitely be the task of translating the English phrase that we received into Cuneiform which was the way things were written in our civilization. Translating to Chinese to English went rather well and left us plenty of time to work on the cuneiform translation.

I had the opportunity to pick the brain of Dr. Ed Stratford for a while and he was very willing to help and give what service he could. From the short amount of time that was spent with him it was reinforced in my mind just how complex cuneiform can be and especially when you get within the different dialects.
Dr. Stratford lent us this book that was a huge help in our translation process.

As mentioned by Alex in his post, we couldn't just simply look up the words from the phrase we had and find the corresponding symbols in cuneiform. We had to spend time looking for words that were used in assyrian cuneiform that would match closely to those that we had in English. The first phrase we were given for example: "Where there's a will there's a way". After looking in the dictionary, we ended up using symbols that corresponded to "Strong Willed achieves/accomplishes Purpose."
This was a neat experience which did take time, but it was interesting to see how it ended up for us.

 The scribing itself was awesome. I thought that this was really neat to to do but once again slow. I was not a fast scriber but that wasn't really a surprise I don't think. As we talked about it, we figured that those that grew up writing cuneiform or were at least familiar with it would have been able to write similar to how we all can write english. That's a speculation of course, but it was neat to think about and it is a lot more fascinating once you actually try writing on a different medium.

 This project helped me to appreciate the skills that go into a manuscript and writing in general. I feel as though paper is a great medium and would choose it over clay at any given point. Clay tablets are great and the cuneiform symbol are really neat looking but i'm still amazed that people could look at those symbols and see a sentence or phrase and understand what is written.

So here's the finished product! I can say that we learned a lot as we worked together on this project and it definitely helped us to grasp the concepts in a new perspective or way. I'm glad that I only have to to use clay tablets for school projects and nothing more and like I mentioned in the beginning, this was probably one of the last things I would have expected to do this semester in this class when I registered for it...but that's okay. Change never hurt anyone.

Thanks to all the group members that worked hard and made this a success!