The Rosetta Balsa Wood

So here is the picture of our final product for the Rosetta Stone Project.  Yes that's right - you have here a sampling of modern English, Akkadian written in cuneiform, and some Mayan glyphs (you have to turn your head to read them by the way).

So the process after receiving our Akkadian clay tablet was a lot harder than anyone expected.  A number of us started to try to find the characters and look up which syllables they represented independently.  Luckily Erin was able to visit with a professor who gave her some more direction.  It turns out that not all the characters were actually correct - revealing to us why it was no one could find a few of them.  After translating all we could, we had to find the original document that the other group used in order fill in the gaps and get it translated to English ---------->
 

 With that done, Holland and Brianne headed up the artistic process (with Will's help and materials of course) of getting the cuneiform written on our "wood paper." This also proved to be very difficult because the ink bleeds easily in the porous wood.  They ended up having to use a SUPER fine pen to get everything to fit as small as possible.

I again was in charge of the Mayan translation which was difficult of course, because 1-Mayan is not completely deciphered yet 2: I am still shady on Mayan syntax and grammar 3: There are not equivalent words in Mayan, English, and Akkadian.   This is something that I have realized as I have volunteered as a Spanish medical translator too.  Sometimes things really are just "lost in translation," whether it is because of translator error, or meanings difficult to express in another language, copy errors, bias of a translator, or just plain laziness in translation.  It is not an easy task.

This was a difficult assignment for MANY reasons but I really liked the idea of it and had fun learning about these mayan glyphs.  I think that it really helped me understand how knowledge is passed on and how that really has changed from the age of writing to typing to the pixel.  I also think this project helped us think creatively in order to solve problems that were completely unfamiliar to us.

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.

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. 

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE AT CHICHEN ITZA

I love architecture and I have been fascinated by the Mayan architecture ever since I started blogging, well to be honest I always have been, but I never quite seemed to be able to fit it into any of the topics I was blogging about. Something I hadn't thought much about until researching for this post is the depth of research and knowledge can come from just a given culture's architecture. We can study a culture through the lens of architecture to examine what the culture deemed important. I would like to highlight a certain pyramid in Chichén Itzá called Kukulkan's pyramid to examine the importance of astronomy and architecture to the Mayans.