Artisan for a Day

The Greek Rosetta Stone!

I belonged to the Greek group who was responsible for creating an authentic text in Greek for another group to struggle with. Since other methods of writing such as papyrus weren't readily available, our group met a fair Wednesday night and took a trip to the local hobby shop. We found good oven baking clay that would work for molding and went to work. Driving together in Brett's car we all returned to the Wilk. We found text that we wanted to use, from the Odyssey, outlined how it would all fit onto the miniature clay tablet and went to work carving. Using the ancient mechanical pencil, we each took a turn inscribing the greek symbols into the tablet. I've taken many math and physics classes so for me the characters were all familiar although I couldn't understand the phrase without help. I noticed that each group member preferred a different amount of depth to each line. I liked a dark thick engraving while others preferred a lighter more brush on method.

The dark line is noticeable through the letters. This is upside down.

Next day, we handed the clay project over to the translating group and began work on our rosetta project taken from the Bamboo leaf. We were told that the writing was in Sanskrit but that was all. We first had to decide which direction the writing went: I looked at it closely and found that the brush strokes were made in a way that the pressure was usually released at the bottom of the line so that it was "hanging" from the solid connecting line. The ruler line marked the top of the text! Next, we took individual symbols and tried to translate them one by one. This was also very difficult because for each symbol there were at least three or four letters that looked similar. We soon tabled this approach and opted for the statistical method. Think like an Indo-European! What is a common text that gets translated a lot, often enough that we have record of it today? We searched the internet for popular Sanskrit texts and after remembering someone mentioning something about Veda so we checked that out. Sure enough, it was the 1st Hymn of the 1st Book of the Rigveda, a sacred book of texts from the 10th Century BC. From there the text into English was simple since others had done the labor already. Whew! Others in the group then translated the text into Greek and we were ready to create!

This time, we wanted to mold the clay into a more flat, rounded tablet about 1/4" so that it would bake evenly when we put it into the oven. From the "raw" clay we had to take water in the Wilk on the study tables and dip parts of the clay that would break off, dip them into hot water (from Summer's water bottle) and work the clay until it quit cracking and was mold-able. After about an half hour of this and accidentally spilling the water bottle onto Sam (Sorry!) we had a good round tablet. I had to leave at that point but would return later that night to find that my wonderful members had already inscribed everything! All that was left was the baking at my house.

I looked up a lot of different articles on baking clay online since the package it came in had no instructions. Some sources scared me, saying that if it's the wrong kind of clay it will melt when you stick it into the oven. There was no room for this!!! I finally decided on a yahoo-answer that I thought reliable enough (like here-say that you finally deem credible) and put the oven on at 250 degrees. I put the clay onto a metal pan and baked it for twenty minutes. The clay didn't change at all... so I kept it in longer, checking every five minutes for the next hour. Finally, the clay began to darken and when you would press on it, the shape would return to normal like a plush item. It was done! I let it cool in the oven to keep any cracks from forming from a sudden temperature change. The result was amazing, especially that a bunch of inexperienced college students could reproduce something like an ancient artisan might. Okay he would probably laugh at our work but it's a start!

The Final product after baking. If you look carefully we left some finger prints in there too. I wonder if any ancient texts had this as well?