Egyptian Frustration

For the end of unit project, I am in the Hebrew/Islam group. For our artifact, we created a double-sided scroll with two passages of scripture: one from the Qu'ran, written in Arabic, and one from the Torah, written in Hebrew. That, however, was the easy part. For the Rosetta project, my group received an Egyptian Hieroglyphic to translate. It turns out that it is very difficult to translate Egyptian logograms. We tried to find a professor to help us, but none were available. So, we went to the library. 10 books and 4 hours later, we still weren't sure what any of it said. We tried to find online Egyptian dictionaries, but everything we found seemed to be directed towards children or high school students. We tried to contact the African group so they could hint at which book to use, but it seemed they either didn't know the title or didn't answer. So after several hours, we just took the symbols we found and strung them together as best as we could. I'm sure the translation is incorrect, but we tried our best. And we were able to correctly translate the English sentence we came up with into Hebrew and Arabic. This assignment taught me quite a few things:

1. I gained a greater appreciation for the people who wrote with actual feather pens. We were using a calligraphy pen and it was extremely difficult. I can't imagine using a feather. It took a long time to get the ink flowing. You have to hold it at the precise angle so it doesn't smear, and you have to take just the right amount of time on each letter so the ink isn't too thick or too thin. And we learned that if the ink isn't flowing, don't suck on the pen, or your mouth will be black.
2. This activity gave me a greater appreciation for the preservation of books and writing throughout the written era of knowledge. It is difficult to make a scroll with two sentences on it, let alone an entire Bible. The monks who managed to write those books, and so beautifully, have my respect and admiration.
3. For our "Rosetta scroll", the parchment wan't long enough, so I sewed two sheets together. This process alone took about an hour. I now have huge respect for ancient bookmakers. I can only imagine how much time and effort it took to sew and bind an entire book. Even with the scrolls of the Middle East, I gained a greater respect for those who took the time to carefully stitch the pages together.
4. I gained a huge appreciation for translators, including Joseph Smith. It also reaffirmed my testimony. If Joseph Smith really had plates (which he did), then there is no way he translated them without the power of God. A roomful of "educated" (more formally educated than Joseph, anyway) college students couldn't translate a single sentence with the wealth of resources offered to us by a library and the internet, yet Joseph Smith managed to translate an entirely new set of scriptures in only a few short months. Egyptian is very difficult to translate. After staring at our artifact and pouring through books for a few hours, I began to wish for a Urim and Thummim, too.

Overall, this project helped me to develop a greater appreciation for those who took so much time and effort to ensure that knowledge could be passed on to future generations. It says a lot about the importance of the material that the writers were so willing to take so much time and effort and blood, sweat, and tears, just for one manuscript, Qur'an, or Bible.

The Arabic Translation

The Egyptian hieroglyphs