Rosetta Stone Project: Greece

This past week I had the opportunity to meet with members of the class who, like me, have been researching the role that oral and written traditions have in Greek culture. We discussed the various methods and materials that the Ancient Greeks used in order to record and write down their knowledge in order to help us come up with ways that we could create our own Greek "artifact." 

Papyrus (a form of our modern day paper) was used in Ancient Greece, but the process of letting the product ferment takes weeks and we had limited time. (The fact that the bookstore does not sell papyrus may have played a role in our decision not to use it as well.)

Stone writings in Greek.

Next, we considered using stone. Many Greek architecture is inscribed with words from the Greek alphabet for the public to see. The Ancient Greeks also used stone tablets to write down records and laws given by various rulers. This made the laws and records permanent, and unchangeable hence the phrase "set in stone."

My group considered using this medium and then we realized that  it would literally take us days to carve into the stone even one word. Since none of us are experts at working with stone, we figured it could get pretty expensive if we had to keep buying more stones if we messed up.

So instead, we came up with the idea of using clay tablets. Clay was used most notably by the Minoan Civilization in Ancient Greece, but it was often used throughout all of Greece in order to keep record of small events that only needed to last a couple of years (such as business transactions). The Greeks wrote in the original Greek language on clay tablets, but the Linear A and Linear B languages were also used (mostly in the Mycenaean Civilization). For the purpose of including all of our Civilizations within the broader group of Ancient Greece, we decided to use the original Greek alphabet.

So we headed to Hobby Lobby and picked up some gray artistic modeling clay that we could use for our project, along with clay three times its length for another group to use when translating. After collecting our medium, we headed back to campus to write our secret message in clay.

Ancient Greek Clay Tablet.

We debated what to write, but eventually decided on something that goes along with Greek culture, but SHHH! It's a secret that I can't share with you! I don't want to spoil the fun :)

After figuring out what we would write, we began to wet the clay down to make it more malleable and easier to mold. We soon discovered, however, that the clay kept cracking even with the continuous coats of water we were adding to soften it. We began to get frustrated because we were trying to shape this clay into a perfect smooth 3"x4" rectangle in order to create our fake artifact. And then we realized...most artifacts are cracked! Not just because they have been around for so long (which is certainly part of the reason), but also because the mediums (such as clay) were just susceptible to being cracked. So we left a crack in our little piece of clay. After we decided how we wanted the tablet to look, it was easy to write down our phrase, because clay is so malleable and easy to fix if a mistake was made. (We would simply just re-wet the area and smooth it out. Then we could write over it again.) At last, when our inscription of our secret phrase was complete we set our clay out to dry and it looked just like an ancient Greek artifact!