You Carved A Stone?!?

I really got a kick out of how the class reacted to our civilization group's written knowledge unit project! Yes. We actually bought a rock and carved into it, just like ancient peoples did. I thought it couldn't have been cooler.

The only major difference between us and the ancients was that we didn't have to make our own tools, and thank goodness for that, because I think making a hammer and chisel would take some resources and skills that we simply don't have!

Really, though, the most difficult part of our project wasn't actually carving our message into the stone. The hard part was deciding what to write in the first place. I won't disclose all the details about that process yet...since I don't want to give away the message before the other group has a chance to take a stab at translating. But I will say that we went through kind of a double translation - first finding our phrase in the Brythonic language, then transferring that language to the phonetically-based Ogham writing system that would have been used for inscribing stones.

Once that part was done, we just had to figure out how to space everything right so that the writing would fit on the stone. This part was kind of my little project and involved lots of paper-folding to center the writing and lots of erasing to get things just right! This kind of made me wonder whether and how the ancients might have planned out their carved writings. Because you can't really change anything once it's set in stone!!

And speaking of setting things in stone...I'm actually kind of excited to see how we'll go about putting our Mayan and English writing on the stone for part two of the project. It will be challenging, for sure, but I think it will work. And to me it's awesome that the resulting "rosetta stone" will be a real stone - with all the permenance of the ancient carvings that have lasted through the ages.