Yey for Clay!

For the final from the writing section, we have had to write in the form that our civilizations wrote in, translate another language and write it in our own. This has been a very challenging project because there is no quick translation tool for Akkadian.
Our group wrote in Akkadian and had to translate Chinese into it. This is what our final products look like:

Chinese                                                        Akkadian                                              English

I think they turned out AMAZING!




We had to use similar materials as the Akkadians would have used. They used clay and a wooden stylus to create their language. It was pretty easy to write the Akkadian into it. The words are just lines and triangles that are stamped in using one end of the stylus. The Chinese was also fairly simple due to the fact that it's mostly straight lines. The English, on the other hand, was a lot harder. Clay doesn't really like curves so I had to make the letters pretty blocky. It's still readable, but not pretty to look at.




The Stylus definitely didn't make the English look good, so we used knives instead (they could have used knives too right?)
To translate the Chinese that we received, we went to some experts. Kody was able to email the picture over to a friend in China who translated it for us. He went on to double check by asking some Chinese girls that he found on campus. Having been translated, we proceeded to write it into clay.

The Akkadian was harder to translate. We first went to the magical and wise world wide web, but unfortunately it had nothing to offer. Instead, we went to a professor (who must be really sick of us right now. Thank you Dr. Stratford!!) who gave us a book (good old reliable print!). Using the book, we were able to roughly translate the Chinese into Akkadian.

To sum it up: I am SO glad that we have paper! And it would have been a lot easier if the people who wrote Akkadian were still alive so that they could teach us as we found with the Chinese.