Bring out the Money

Cabbage, dough, mulla, green, buck. The number of terms of endearment for currency is staggering. I can recognize money immediately, as can most of you.  In currency there needs to be extreme consistency, inconsistencies are what allow us to identify forgeries. The first money was coinage. It could be cast or imprinted with exactness. The level of consistency needed for paper money to function was made possible by the advent of printing. And for that we can thank the Chinese.

The Chinese gift

Qufu

For the Rosetta stone project  I had the opportunity to work with the group representing Asia. Two of us represented China, one Japan, and one Cambodia. Because the majority of our group represented China, and China represents the majority of the world, we thought it best to portray China in our project.
Our first thought was to have a quote from Confucius on rice paper. This would have been culturally significant because paper was invented in China (see Shuan's post on this). However, attempts at making rice paper were disastrous. Contrary to popular belief, at least my own and that of my group members, rice paper is not actually made out of rice. It is made out of rice straw or more modernly wood fiber,, mulberry, or bamboo. Also the arguably most famous Confucius artifact is actually the Confucius temple of Qufu. Confucius sayings are inscribed in stone.

Going Mayan

Me trying out different inks with the sketches.

Will and I are in the same group for the Rosetta Project so he made a wonderful post about the process of creating our rosetta thing.  He pretty much summed up that whole process so I won't add much to what he said.  I instead wanted to blog a little about the process of coming up with the writing that we were going to use.

Because this project is pretty time consuming, our group mostly split up into smaller specialty groups to get it done and so that we wouldn't be spending way too much time to finish the project.  So I pretty much ended up as the Mayan language expert.  The mayan language can be pretty daunting.  Various dialects of Mayan are spoken today, but none quite like the ancient language.  Modern Mayan is also written in regular Roman lettering like English, so trying to crack the code of Mayan glyphs was a pretty daunting task.

Printing and Digital Media.

The printing press, which I talked about in a previous blog post, made it possible for literature to be mass produced at a quicker rate that was less expensive. It provided the common people of the Renaissance Era the opportunity to own books and read what great scholars where discovering and learning all over the world. But that's just it...printing allowed GREAT SCHOLARS and WELL KNOWN FIGURES to promote their ideas.

Gutenberg Press

People like John Locke, Martin Luther and Voltaire were able to express their revolutionary ideas. John Locke, for example, promoted a more liberal philosophy which is considered a "keystone" to American government and other Western countries' governments. Martin Luther was considered the father of the Protestant Reformation, which taught people to break away from the traditional teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and taught that it was through the grace of God and one's own faith that one could be saved. Voltaire, another prominent figure (writer) of the Renaissance Era who advocated freedom of religion, free trade, and separation of church and state. 

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.)

Mayan Glyphing Party

This past Wednesday I had the opportunity with Mike and others not from our group to travel back in time and get our hands dirty with the beautiful Mayan glyph writing system. 

Scripts and Fonts

I think that this week for everyone is a pretty crazy one.  I am going to do you all a favor by trying to keep this short (and to do myself a favor too).  Since we just barely switched over from written knowledge to print, I thought I'd make sort of a bridge post about the transition and its effects on the way we write.

Compare these two writing samples.

A sample written script.

Sample font from Gutenberg's Bible

Obviously not all written things are that hard to read and not all print was that detailed and beautiful, but that is just an example.

A few weeks ago I got a random email from FamilySearch about indexing.  (Family Search indexing is a way that anyone can give service by transcribing old written documents into electronic type so that they are readily searchable for people studying their genealogy.)  The email linked me to a few sites about paleography which got me thinking about the differences between our letters today and the letters of 'back then' and the way that print changed that.

Marginalia: Facinating or Defacing?

Marginalia: marginal notes or embellishments (as in a book).  Latin.            
Love,
Webster

Marginalia of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Behind the Mystery of Facsimile 2

Last week I posted about Facsimile 2 and said that I would follow up with this topic of the occult with a more in depth look at two very important factors of Facsimile 2. These factors are the centrality of God and His divine purposes. In my more comprehensive study I found that I had to sift through the not so in depth LDS.org library on this topic and the mountain of anti-Mormon material there is out there. After carefully avoiding all the anti-Mormon pollution, I found this interesting book called A Study Guide to the Facsimiles of the Book of Abraham written by Church scholar  Allen J. Fletcher.  I also found a link to the LDS Pearl of Great Price Study Manual. (Due to the lack of information and excess of anti-Mormon material, all of my information will come from those two sites unless otherwise noted...) Without any further ado: here are some key points and notes behind the mystery that is Facsimile 2 from the Book of Abraham from the Pearl of Great Price. 

An update on me (I know, SO interesting ;-)

Hey guys!! I have been sick this past week, which is why I missed class on Thursday and have not been commenting.  But I hope to catch up today and tomorrow on comments, because I am interested in what you have learned about and shared.
I have read our instructors' blog post about the Rosetta Project, but I was wondering if there was anything else I should know about class.  What we learned about that was your favorite part or something.  I would appreciate anything you would like to tell me about.  Thanks, and I can't wait to see you on Tuesday!