Art and institutions that saved

Our Civilizations class, here at BYU, had the rare opportunity to view a few pieces from the special collections section of the Harold B. Lee Library a couple of weeks ago. The narrator was Maggie Kopp, a curator of rare books at the library, and after the presentation was over I stayed around to talk with her for a bit. She showed me something that she didn’t get to show the rest of the class; a Book of Common Prayer that had a painting on the fore-edge. When you flipped it to the other side, it had another painting. To the left is a picture of one side.

These paintings on the fore-edge of a book were used to draw and catch our attentions, but even more commonplace were the elaborately illuminated initial letters. Yes, these illuminations were used for organizational aspects, such as showing us where the beginning of a chapter or book starts, but they were also to show us important places in a book such as preferred verses of scripture. This example to the left is the beginning chapters of a book in the Bible. The illuminations uses all over the page were not for the beginning of the chapter; they were for the beginning of each verse. Since these inscriptions were so expensive, this example shows us that these verses must have meant a lot to the person paying for them. When books were valued more, before the invention of printing press, they were “treasured as works of art and as symbols of enduring knowledge. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, the book becomes an attribute of God” (Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters). This is a little of what Maggie shared with me at the end of our class.

Since not everybody can be talented in the arts, these tasks of making ornate books were given to the monks. Monasteries kept not only sacred texts but also scientific, literary and philosophical works from Roman and Greek authors. The monarchy commissioned these texts and especially gospel centered ones.

Monks and nuns kept many manuscripts of Greek andRoman authors. Many knew Latin, so they were able to read Latin works by the Romans, and Latin translations of Greek authors. Medieval European monks and nuns are credited as being the last places to preserve literary works. As we can see, monks and nuns were writing institutions in themselves. They were perhaps the saving grace for many works of literature and art they we would not have otherwise.

Developing Knowledge Skillz

According to the Learning Outcomes for this class I should learn new knowledge skills. Therefore this will just be a short post while I go off and develop some. This weekend I am going with BYU's GEO club to Blanding Utah to work on some engineering projects for people of the Navajo Nation. In that time I will take advantage of several opportunities to develop some of my knowledge skill.

School

You might not think that school today would share many parallels to those in the Middle Ages, but the structure made back then can still be seen today.

During the 800's the King Charlemagne of France decreed that the Church would provide free education to boys. This was a radical idea. Could a kingdom really be stronger if the subjects were educated? could they handle the extra knowledge they were given or would they rebel?

It turns out (surprise) that an educated people is stronger.

The Changes Brought by Written Knowledge

The transition from oral knowledge to writing brought change not just to the form with which knowledge was passed on, but to society itself. Writing brings a different slant and political meaning than does oral knowledge, it helps to standardize a language, and it brings about entire institutions based on writing and written knowledge.

The spread of ideas and knowledge through codex

The rise of the codex formatting of written knowledge, that is, in book form, led to the spread of ideas and knowledge, especially the rise of the Bible and Christianity. The codex form was and is highly preferred because of how compact, sturdy, durable and easy it is to use. Once there were books that were easy to use and easier (than scrolls) to distribute, the widespread distribution could take place.

Although the widespread distribution of the Bible came about around 400 A.D., the way that it did so (through codex) has a much earlier history. Codex was originally developed by the Romans from wax writing tablets. These tablets would be made of wood covered with wax, like the reproduced modern tablet to the right. Also shown in the picture, are writing instruments that were not only used for the obvious, but also to scratch out and smooth over the wax with the flat end of the instrument.

No one gets everything right on the first try, so it makes sense that the Romans created a way of writing for learning. It is reasonable to use something like wax and these special writing instruments to practice. These were not expensive forms of writing like animal skin or parchment. Messing up and starting over was not a huge issue; it was easy.

This gradual replacement of the scroll has been marked as the most important advancement in history until the printing press. The creation of codex did two hugely notable things. The first was that the formatting made widespread knowledge possible. Although there were those who sought to eliminate the spread of ideas and information because with it came power, codex formatting led to the mass spread of knowledge, and especially, the Bible. Something else that codex did, for example with the Roman’s early wax tablets, was made it more possible to learn. Students could erase and rewrite. The formatting established a new, easier way of learning. After all, practice makes perfect, right?

From Oral to Written

We began our unit on written knowledge this past week discussing various materials and forms of written language. In the Mediterranean region, as well as East Asia, the writing down of language did much to change the face of politics in that particular region.  For the Greeks and Romans this meant carting the conquered nation's library off to your land to hold their knowledge hostage, and assert your authority.

From dwcouch on Flickr. 

Interestingly enough when Europe came to conqueror America they thought to use this same method, to no avail. At the time that Europe came to America most the native peoples did not have written systems, and of those that did reading and writing were not everyday activities.

Propaganda

This is not going to be about Akkadia (sorry about that), but about Persia.
We have all grown up with propaganda (definition: information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation,etc.) 

As it turns out, humans love to use propaganda. Persia was no exception.

Runes: Elder Futhark

Runes were developed approximately 2,000 years ago. One of the runic alphabets, Elder Futhark was created around 150 AD and is the oldest runic alphabet we know of. Mainly used by Germanic tribes, this pre-alphabet consisting of 24 runes was used to decorate jewelry, amulets, tools, and even weapons. This alphabet was used until about the 8th century 8 AD, when a more refined alphabet was developed and this one was forgotten.

The Elder Futhark, or Germanic Futhark, was used by the Germanic tribes of Sweden. It consisted of 24 letters, starting with F and ending with O. The name of the alphabet itself comes from the first letters in the sequence:

f

u

þ

a

r

k

(þ is pronounced "Th")

Language Adoption

The story of Rome’s rapid conquer of Europe is known to anyone who knows basic 7^th grade history, but the story of the conquest of the Latin language is vague in the minds of most of us. If we asked ourselves how it came about, we would probably think of the widespread supremacy of Latin as a result of the rapid conquering of Europe. Although the Latin language is dead, there are still many scholars and schools that are fluent in it and teach it, as well as the Catholic Church using it up until the 20^th Century and it being the official language of the Vatican City. We still know so much about the language’s etymology although it is considered “dead”.

Latin has relations to Etruscan, ancient Greek and other Indo-European Languages (more about Indo-European Languages here). More on the letters and phonetics of those languages in relation to Latin can be seen here and here. One can see the similarities in the written letters and according to Florian Coulmas, author of The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, the most common language, being Latin, derived from the first true alphabet, Greek. We can see that on the pages with links above. The Greek and Latin letters are sometimes indistinguishable.

We see similar happenings in our society. As the Romans adopted words, letters, sounds etc. from the Indo-European languages, and especially Greek, we (English speakers) do the same. Perhaps even more intensely, we adopt words and pronunciations from other languages, even ones completely unrelated. This makes English one of the hardest languages to master; it is ever changing and one cannot always apply the same rules to all words. The pronunciation of the French word foyer, as in a lobby or reception area, is an example of this. This word is completely adopted from the French. If we were to pronounce it with an English accent it would be pronounced with a definite “r” sound at the end. If we were to pronounce it with the correct pronunciation, since it is a French word we are speaking, it would be pronounced “foi-yey”. This is, perhaps, a more intense and obvious way of manipulating the written language like the Romans did with the Indo-European Languages.

Works Cited
Coulmas, Florian. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell, 1996. Print. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems.

Power of Orality

For those of you not in the Reinventing Knowledge class here at BYU, we recently memorized and recited as a class King Benjamin's Speech (see Mosiah 2:9 - 5:15) from the Book of Mormon.  Below is the Youtube video posted by Dr. B. Our group starts at about 6:50 and continues to 10:05, but I highly recommend you watch the enitre video!

Now I'd like like to add a couple of post traumatic stress thoughts to the process and results of making this speech. As well as the power of the spoken word.

Where in the world?

Today as I looked around the Reinventing Knowledge class blog, and read Dr. B's great post on self-directed learning, I came to wonder what my good friend Shuan is getting from our class. (This arranged seating puts her outside of my in-class whispering range.) So I went and looked up her most recent post, found here.  Shuan did a great job on the post, but I liked best what Jake had to say about the Silk Road and the internet. Therefore below I'm going to share how to find who is looking at your posts/blog and where in the world are they from. (Because this is generally awesome!) I may also share some thoughts about the Silk road and the internet. (But you'll have to read it to find out!)

Lingua Franca

We are now moving onto written languages, but still with Akkadia (for me at least).
Akkadian is one of the oldest written languages of all time [The Hebrew University of Jerusalem]. It was first a language that was only spoken, but the neighboring civilization of Sumeria invented a writing form. When Akkadia took over Sumeria, they adopted and changed the written language to form a cuneiform text.

Here is an example of the Akkadian language. Below shows just how time consuming writing could be!

Lost Languages

As we are drawing to a close on our Oral Knowledge Unit, I have found myself wondering a couple of things:How do languages transition from oral to written?

What happens if they can't make this transition? Will the language be able to survive? Or will it die out forever?

(Not that!)

After pondering these questions for awhile, I became curious as to how languages do go extinct. It turns out, there are four main reasons why languages die out.

So what's the good in all of this history?

The value of historical knowledge, and especially moral stories having been passed down, is that they give the present a sense of perspective. It helps us in understanding and assessing our own values and ways.

Luisa Del Giudice, from the American Italian Historical

Association states that, "One of the things that make oral history different is that while more conventional history is primarilty interested in what happened-why was the massacre carried out, in what way, whose responsibility is it, what was its place in the overall military scenario of and of the Resistence-oral history also asks another question: what does it mean?"

All Together Now

Following the assignment to create a group post/video we came up with the following video. (Turn your speakers all the way up, we are amateur movie makers!)

Now we would just like to put in a few words more on the topic of Story and Song. In the video we talked about each other's civilizations and how they all relate through the theme of water in their origin myths, and stories in general. Maddie shared a little bit more on this theme here. What we didn't get to is how this important oral knowledge is shared, or the structures for sharing it.

All that we've learned: Oral Knowledge

From US Embassy New Delhi on Flickr

For those of you counting on this post to go up Friday morning, sorry despite the rumors I'm not perfect. This post took a little more research than I originally intended. As our discussion of oral knowledge winds down I wanted to take the opportunity to look back at all of that we've learned and discussed on this blog. Although our instructors have given us many interesting topics to learn about in this unit, I've enjoyed the themes that we pulled out here on our blog.

Myth Dreaming

The Epic of Gilgamesh (Linked to the translation)
This story of a king who was two-thirds God, is a long tale of how Gilgamesh came to defeat everything in his path.The story (probably told orally at first) was written in Akkadian on eleven stone tablets. The words still show traces of the oral format and also contain stories that other cultures have.

Samaritan Synagogues

In the ancient land of Samaria, the citizens of the land established synagogues to further God's word among them. These places of teaching and prayer, however, had many similarities with the Greek open-air theaters of the time period. Because of the structural similarities, I have been wondering what other similarities that may exist.

Myths make the world go around..

Although Roman mythology lacks the extensive list of literary work that documents Greek mythology, their oral myths have been noted, especially in their relation to Greek myths. The myths and stories played more of an important role in the religious system in Greece than Rome, where ritual and cult were valued. Although different names and myths (a full list of the different names and meanings can be found here), there were many of the same values reflected in them.