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| Clay tablet with Sanskrit, Greek, and English translations. |
सचस्वा नः सवस्तये"
"sa naḥ piteva sūnave.aghne sūpāyano bhava
sacasvā naḥ svastaye"
"Να είναι εύκολο να μας όσον αφορά την προσέγγιση, έστω και ωςπατέρας στο γιο του: Αγνή, να είναι μαζί μας για ευτυχία μας."
We received from the "India" group this line from Book One Hymn One of the Rig Veda. Since I remember Crista talking about the Rig Veda in her reports on India, I figured we should start there. So, fortunately, versions of the Rig Veda are available online---and luckily the sentence was the last sentence of Book One Hymn One. We were able to easily match the sanskrit.
English versions of the Rig Veda are also easily available, so all we had to do match Greek to the English as best as possible.
In doing this project, I realized a few interesting traits of working with clay.
First, working with clay is actually pretty easy, for the most part. Writing in it was fairly easy. . .I mean, have you ever written in clay or Play-doh before? Pretty easy, right? So was writing in the clay. If you mess up, then all you have to do is rub the mistake out of the clay. It's like you're writing in pencil on an eraser.
Another thing I noticed is that while clay is easy to write on, once it's burned in a kiln, it's rather definitive. However, it would seem rather inappropriate to bring clay to, say, a university to take notes on. About the time that the written tradition started to take over in Greece, papyrus was also popular. So, bringing clay to class and recording teacher's words would seem maybe out of place.
Which brings me to the point of this blog: Are some mediums of writing more appropriate for a situation than another? Today, you can take notes manually with a pen and pencil, or on a computer, or record them, or, I suppose, even videotape the lecture if you felt so inclined. But then again, I rarely see someone bring their computer to church to take notes. It wasn't until recent that it seemed appropriate to use the internet version of the scriptures to annotate and highlight.
This project taught me that mediums of writing are more than just materials, but, like the mother tongue and father tongue, there is a paternal implication for every material---in other words, there is an expectation for every writing medium.
So does that mean, for example, chiseling in stone is more manly than writing on papyrus? What do you think?
"Be to us easy of approach, even as a father to his son: Agni, be with us for our weal.--"
English versions of the Rig Veda are also easily available, so all we had to do match Greek to the English as best as possible.
In doing this project, I realized a few interesting traits of working with clay.
First, working with clay is actually pretty easy, for the most part. Writing in it was fairly easy. . .I mean, have you ever written in clay or Play-doh before? Pretty easy, right? So was writing in the clay. If you mess up, then all you have to do is rub the mistake out of the clay. It's like you're writing in pencil on an eraser.
Another thing I noticed is that while clay is easy to write on, once it's burned in a kiln, it's rather definitive. However, it would seem rather inappropriate to bring clay to, say, a university to take notes on. About the time that the written tradition started to take over in Greece, papyrus was also popular. So, bringing clay to class and recording teacher's words would seem maybe out of place.
Which brings me to the point of this blog: Are some mediums of writing more appropriate for a situation than another? Today, you can take notes manually with a pen and pencil, or on a computer, or record them, or, I suppose, even videotape the lecture if you felt so inclined. But then again, I rarely see someone bring their computer to church to take notes. It wasn't until recent that it seemed appropriate to use the internet version of the scriptures to annotate and highlight.
This project taught me that mediums of writing are more than just materials, but, like the mother tongue and father tongue, there is a paternal implication for every material---in other words, there is an expectation for every writing medium.
So does that mean, for example, chiseling in stone is more manly than writing on papyrus? What do you think?
That definitely brings up an interesting point. I couldn't imagine people bringing their laptop to record notes in sacrament. For me I realized though that writing with pen and paper makes things more memorable. The act of writing the characters down after hearing them helps to internalize the information which I feel is true for most of us I guess. Simply typing squares on a laptop doesn't seem to have the same effect, for me at least. It makes me think of different civilizations and their languages and writing systems. Are they even able to use their alphabet on computer, are certain languages more technologically able?
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