Adventures in the Life of Catherine Hawkley

Over the past two days I've kinda felt like a drug dealer.  I arranged drop off meetings, one of which occurred in a deserted lobby, and transported goods from one place to another.  These "goods" were actually and a page of translation we needed to create our tablet, so theses meetings were all completely legal, the setup just made me laugh.



So cuneiform is really hard to translate and read if you don't have any experience with it.  Morgan and I took a trip down to the Museum of Peoples and Cultures here at BYU to see if we could copy the inscriptions on a clay nail.  We ran into some problems.  First of all, we didn't actually know were the inscription started and ended.

As you can see, the inscription wraps around the nail.  We think this is where the end meets the beginning.  We did not end up copying this because we couldn't figure out how it worked.  Instead we used the translation of this nail, provided by Dr. Stratford, that contained the English translation and syllable representation of the cuneiform symbols to match the syllables to the cuneiform symbols.  The two letter syllables were pretty easy to find.  Ancient Script's page on Akkadian has a table that matches consonant and vowel sounds together.  Luckily, Morgan understood how the table worked and explained it to me, because I was having trouble figuring it out.  Syllables that have more than two letters or contained accented vowels were more difficult to find.  I found a french website that contains a table where the symbol is listed next to the corresponding syllables, but it doesn't have a system of organization I  could decipher and it lists 600 symbols.  It took me a while to figure out what was actually on that website, mostly because I didn't want to work with a website that was in a foreign language, but once I took the time to use my limited french to read some of the words, I figured out were to find the list.  The hardest part of this whole activity was trying to find the right syllable in that list.  It took forever.
Then came the carving (actually some of the looking up of syllables was taking place at the same time of the carving).  I found the right symbol and Morgan copied it into the clay.  This process was repeated several times until we came to a syllable not on the Ancient Scripts list, in which case we skipped it to find it later.  Morgan had to leave to go to work, and I finished up the carving.  We used a stylus that Jared made.  It has a triangle shape on one end and a knife-like shape on the other.  Working with clay was good because we could smooth over whatever places we messed up and try again.  We had to make our symbols fairly large because our tools were fairly large.  We also had to enlarge our tablet a couple of times because we underestimated the space it would take up.  We learned that there is an optimum applied pressure when using the stylus and that drawing lines in toward the triangles helps to remove excess clay.  Unfortunately, neither of us had a camera, so this epic event was not documented in pictures.
Good luck to whoever has to translate our tablet.