Clay Tablet post

So the moral of the story is...saved posts do not equal publish posts. Saved posts remain in cyberspace limbo. This was supposed to have been published like two weeks ago. So here it is anyways.

On February 8, 2011 a class set out to imagine the world from the eyes of an ancient Sumerian. What we received was one dowel, one large clump of clay, a stylus, and a mission. My group, which consisted of Gilles and Jackie and myself, had the task of writing a very long Latin phrase about Caesar onto a very small, fragile clay block. In order to attempt this task we had to make a few primary considerations as the medium with which we were working. In my younger days as a high school art student I had dealt with clay, kilning and scoring of clay and ceramics. Jackie and Gilles mainly dealt with the rolling out of the clay, although I did help them by telling them to soften the clay by playing around with it in their hands (to add heat and increase viscosity). The canvas we ended up with was vertical, the perfect thickness and looked a lot like a scroll. I was chosen to be the scribe based on my neatness of handwriting derived from a quick glance at my notes. I knew I would have to make some sort of organizational decisions about how to write that much onto a small clay tablet. I sketched straight lines across the tablet in order to maintain clarity and order and started to write in my regular hand. I found that this irritated the clay and instead opted for block lettering which seemed to be more legible even in a very small clay-ey font. I had to be very careful to spell everything correctly and make sure I had enough room for each word and that each word looked and was spaced similarly.

We finished the task pretty quickly, and soon enough people were peeking over our shoulders to see what we had done. It wasn't a highly creative work, but it was legible and it was useful as a tool. Other people in the class took this to be more of an artistic pursuit, but my group just set out to make a legible and useful manuscript. I am glad to not have to write on clay tablets and instead use computers and pen and paper but the experience made me think more about writing in the process, and even language itself. Although I have only taken one Latin class when I was about 8, I could decipher the root words of the “to go” verb in Latin from the Spanish verb for “to go.” This is the same concept that helped me with knowing how to manipulate clay: drawing on past experiences to create new boundaries and ideas through that experience.

In general technology works in the same way. If we can’t seem to make rounded letters work in a certain medium we work with the tools we are given to develop a better way, like block letters. In the same way, new media is not a disintegration of older literacy mores, but rather the standing top of the technology iceberg.