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 Bible Exhibit

I went down to BYU's special collections exhibit "The Life and Legacy of the King James Bible" and noticed some things by looking at the different editions of the Bible.

The font the Bible is printed in has become more legible over time.  This occurred in correlation with the with the Bible being printed.  As more people had access to Bible's and gained the ability to read, the beauty of the Bible became less important than the words themselves.

The shapes of letters has changed over the last 500 years.  We no longer use elongated "s"s which are easy to confuse with "f"s.  Also, "u"s were shaped like "v"s, so the word fun would look like fvn.

The spelling of words became more standard as printed material became more popular.  "The Great Bible," which was handwritten, has the full title "The Byble in Englishe that is the Olde and New Testament, after the translacion appointed to bee read in the churches."  The Geneva Bible published in 1594 contains the message "translated according to the Ebrew and Greeke and conferred with the best translations in diuers languages."  By the time the King James Bible was first printed, most of the spellings of words was more like what we see today.  The full title of the King James Bible is the King James Bible (The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments.

Interesting fact: Robert Barker, who had a monopoly on the printing of the King James Bible, continued to print the Geneva Bible while printing the King James Bible because the Geneva Bible still brought in a lot of revenue.

The printing of the Bible was highly influential, as it led to the average person having greater access to the word of God.  Poets and prose writers was often alluded to the book which continues to be the most read book in the world.

Lost in Translation

In my previous post about the midterm assignment, I talked about the difficulties my group and I faced in trying to create our artifact. Now, I would like to discuss the difficulties we faced in trying to translate another group's artifact. Our assigned group was the Africa group, otherwise known as the Egypt group, otherwise known as the group with the language that seems impossibly difficult to interpret. In a word, trying to figure out the Egyptian was hard. In many words it was infuriatingly difficult.

Within our group, each of us was assigned different tasks. My assigned task was to figure out how to translate the message from English to Arabic once we had translated the Egyptian to English. Unfortunately our group couldn't really make it even that far. Whether or not there is a specialist in Egyptian at BYU or not we either chose not to meet with that person or could not meet with them for whatever reason. In any case, we found ourselves in the library pouring over books about the Egyptian language for hours trying to find some sort of meaning in the assigned artifact. Here's the difficulty we discovered: there's too many meanings to each symbol!

In Egyptian, there are a multitude of different symbols, all of which can stand for individual letters or even complete words. Additionally different arrangements of different symbols can completely change the individual meaning of each symbol. In the assortment of different books we used (there were about six) we found some of the symbols used by the Egypt group, but a large majority of their symbols were no where to be found.

Eventually, we created a sentence that may or may not have had the intended meaning of the Egypt group's original message. From the group, we found out that each symbol was suppose to be a word in itself. So we wrote down a line of blanks (one for each word in the sentence) and started filling in each blank with the different meanings of each symbol that we could identify. From there we had to do a little bit of guess work. Altogether, we came up with a sentence that basically stated that a man from a city identified by a river  traveled to a different city (a city of strength?) where he was killed. We think perhaps the sentence is suppose to be talking about Christ's crucifixion, but without actually talking to the source of the sentence, it's hard to say.

Because of this, I am really starting to relate to the frustrations that interpreters must have felt in trying to translate Egyptian hundreds of years ago. And really, with all the double meanings and ever changing use of each symbol it's a wonder that any one actually could translate Egyptian with out divine assistance. I know I certainly couldn't!

Midterm

For our midterm assignment, we created a Rosetta Artifact. Since only three of our civilizations had a written language to choose from, we decided to encode our message in the ancient written language of Ogham. Finding something in Brythonic proved to be the real difficulty: when we met at my apartment last Wednesday, we spent the first few hours google-ing up a storm trying to find something authentic we could write. We finally found a book with some authentic Brythonic words. I quickly wrote out the Ogham on a sheet of loose paper, which we then transferred to a sheet of news print (which I thankfully had just lying in my car) so we could draw it to scale before transferring it to stone. That's when the fun part began: chiseling our midterm into rock.

We didn't want to run out of stone before we finished what we had to say, so we wrote it out on news print and followed the spacing very closely.

 

See the three horizontal lines that are not very evenly spaced? I carved them :)
Being able to look at that stone and know that I made my mark on it is kind of cool.

Ink, Sweat and Keeping the Press Moving

"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years." Henry Thoreau

Pauper's Bible - The First Cartoon Strips

Let's start a printing business! We are both venture capitalists with a bit of money and an itch to get into the printing business. What should we print? Who's going to buy and why would they buy it? Well, to start I'd like to mention a few of the types of books that were the "Bestsellers" of the early Renaissance, and maybe then we'll be able to answer these questions.

What were the "Must Reads" of the 1500's?


Nowadays, if you want to know which books are the most popular you can go check a status on the New York Times Bestseller list. However, due to the limited number of books that went into each printing, it was more easy to determine how a book was doing by the number of different editions which were printing. Many editions generally meant that the book was a very popular one. So what were people reading 500 years ago? Well, the obvious one that we can accredit is the Bible, one that has held the title defiantly throughout the Medieval period. The renaissance however gave rise to new tastes and likes. One print of the Bible was the Bibla Paupernum ("Pauper's Bible"), a sort of illustrated text or cartoon strip where more than words were characters talking to one another. Also "Emblem Books" were popular, lessons in book format which seem to be the precursors of the picture book or textbook with pictures and commentary. Andrea Alciato unintentionally started this explosive craze that swept over Europe. He treated his emblems as highly valuable and prefaced his book Emblemata with

Emblem Book Example. What's under the table?

"While boys are entertained by nuts and youths by dice, so playing-cards fill up the time of lazy men. In the festive season we hammer out these emblems, made by the distinguished hand of craftsmen. Just as one affixes trimmings to clothes and badges to hats, so it behooves every one of us to write in silent marks. Though the supreme emperor may give to you, for you to own, precious coins and finest objects of the ancients, I myself shall give, one poet to another, paper gifts: take these, Konrad, the token of my love."

Another popular genre was in the medical field. Books of Secrets as they were called were filled with remedies and cures to all sorts of sicknesses, problems and worries. Translated into almost every European language and in print for well over 200 years, this was the beginning of science in the public eye and a more public or social obligation of the scientist to the community. Reading a bit from the English translation of "Secrets" by Alexis of Piedmont, the author frequently references his remedies to help the sick while holding the value of his "secrets" like a trade secret. I guess everyone likes their secrets!

Printing Volume Geographically over first five decades of the press

What were other secrets? Machiavelli's The Prince was a most curious read where a the destined Medici family was to be instructed in the ways of a true leader. Royals and commoners alike enjoyed learning because it was an increase of knowledge. Like the "secrets" of Alexis, most people understood the connection between knowledge and power, thus taking every opportunity to learn about the world they did not understand. It was a sort of reality TV show for the 16th century fanclub!

Other popular books during the 16th century included: Gargantua and Pantegruel by Rabelais, Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia (however I'm not sure if it was popular then), books on European Folklore, The founding myths of Rome.

Suleiman The Magnificent (1530).
As an aside, some Literature didn't catch on, like this fashion. Maybe some day!

One thing is for sure, the influx of published literature from the printing press allowed for the more curious reader, one who could question things, read more and gain knowledge more readily. By only the end of the 15th century, over 20 million copies of printed books were in circulation, with that number growing exponentially by the year.

Translating part II

So, after my previous adventure, the second half of translating was not nearly as exciting, but we got done what we needed to.

See No Evil

"Censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout history." Mette Neweth

I recently came across the following video:

Given Jimmy Kimmel's compilation of unnecessarily censored videos clips and Catherine's post on newspapers, I've been thinking a lot about censorship lately and wanted to learn more about the subject.