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In
this series I share our Story of the World lesson, but even if you're
not using SOTW, if you're studying ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, you
might enjoy the activities and info in this post about ancient forms of
writing (Hieroglyphics and Cuneiform).
Day 1: Egyptian Writing
There's something interesting that you won't find in most kids books on Egypt (and that isn't mentioned in Story of the World either)...that there were TWO types of writing in Egypt.
Hieroglyphs
Hieratic Writing
The common Egyptian used a shorthand form of writing called hieratic. It derived from hieroglyphics but was used alongside it (it didn't replace hieroglyphics). While priests and monument carvers still used hieroglyphics, merchants and traders and everyone else used hieratics for their everyday writing...their grocery lists and love notes.
Most kids books about ancient Egypt don't even mention Hieratics, but The Usborn Time Traveler has a nice description and examples of both, and you can find a free printable comparing hieratics and hieroglyphics here.
DAY ONE SOTW READING
(If you're not using SOTW, you can skip this section and scroll on to the activites below)
The paragraphs are split up differently in the original and revised versions of this chapter, so I tried to note both locations below.
Paragraph 1- 5 (Revised Version) (Original: 1-2)
At paragrph 4 (2 orig), I stopped and used the Time Traveler book, which has a nice description of both Hieratics and Hieroglyphs, with examples of how they were used. Before moving on, we also looked at hieroglyphics in various library books about Egypt, and hieratic in pictures I found online. When I taught this section at our co-op I also used this excellent free printable comparing hieratics and hieroglyphics I had found after our lesson the previous year at home.
Since paragraph 4 (Orig. 2) is a little inaccurate, here's some suggestions on how to change it up a little. First, here's the original...
The Egyptians use pictures to write with. We call these pictures hieroglyphs. The pictures stood for certain words. The Egyptians use to carve these hieroglyphs into stone tablets.I realize the author was trying to keep it simple, but it doesn't take much more to add this detail about how Hieroglyphs didn't just stand for words, they stood for sounds too. Here's two ways to alter this paragraph (the 2nd adding details about hieratics too):
Alteration 1 (Par 2 rev/4 orig):
The Egyptians used pictures to write with. We call these pictures hieroglyphs. The pictures sometimes stood for words, and sometimes stood for sounds. The Egyptians used to carve these hieroglyphs into stone tablets.Alteration 2 (Changing par 4-5/orig 2) to add info about hieratics.
The Egyptians used pictures to write with. We call these pictures hieroglyphs. The pictures sometimes stood for words, and sometimes stood for sounds. The Egyptians used to carve these hieroglyphs onto stone tablets, or even into the walls of their temples.
The stone tablets lasted for a very long time--but they were heavy to carry, and carving the pictures into stone took weeks of work.
That's why most common Egyptians didn't write in hierogyphys. In stead they used a type of writing we call hieratic. It was based off of hieroglyps, but simpler. In stead of carving it on stone slabs, they would write notes in ink to each other on small rocks and bits of broken pottery, which were cheap and easy to find. But hieroglypics were still used for monuments and important religious stories.You could follow that up by showing this printable picture of hieroglyphics and hieratic. There's also some really great pictures of scribe tools (including papyrus plants, which comes in handy later in this chapter) in the DK Ancient Egypt book if you have that at your library.
ACTIVITIES
1. CARTOUCHE
I helped my child write his name in Hieroglyphics on a cartouche print-out from the free Ancient Egypt Unit Study at Royal Baloo (in stead of the examples from the activity book, which I thought were so-so, we used the Hieroglyphics from History Pockets - Ancient Egypt because they were simpler and larger, so easer to copy from. A quick online search will bring up lots of Hieroglyphics charts you can use for free that are also well done.
2. ONLINE GAME
We did the online Egyptian Tomb Adventure Game. It fit well with this section because it has some hieroglyphic "decoding" worked in, but it also has some map work and exploration about mummies, symbols, and Egyptian burial practices (so, you could save this for the chapter on mummies). This was very cleverly done, and my son liked it quite a lot.
3. HIEROGLYPHS AND SCRIBES PALLET CRAFT
When we did this chapter with our co-op group, I gathered up smooth rocks at a local garden center, and also broke ups an old terra cotta pot, which we painted hieroglyphs and hieratic on with red and black paint (the most commonly used ink colors in ancient Egypt). Kids learning to be scribes in Egypt would practice hieroglyphs on flat rocks and broken potter too...so writing hieroglyphs on these is just as "historical" as writing on papyrus. I also made reed "brushes" and scribe pallets (a craft I found in Make It Work: Ancient Egypt) for the kids to use. Probably should have let them help me make them, but the craft involves an sharp knife, and there was mixed ages.
HIEROGLYPHS AND SCRIBES PALLET CRAFT
SUPPLIES:
For Stone Painting
- Red and Black Paint (goes in Pallet if you make that)
- Flat-ish stones and/or a terra-cotta pot (and hammer + trash bag or safety glasses)
- Balsa wood strips (find at hobby store)
- Harder wood strips for base (optional...see note in instructions)
- Wood Glue
- Round object (see step 8)
- Cardboard to cut on (a cereal box folded flat works well)
- Utility Knife
For Reed "Brushes":
- Any old reed-like weedy grass
- Scissors
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Collect stones or break a terra-cotta pot. It's a toss up which is better to use. The terra cotta is smoother and easier to paint on, but has jagged edges (though not as sharp as glass). Many garden centers have stones you can buy, or will not mind you taking smaller broken pieces from larger flat stones they sell. But if you choose to break a terra cotta pot with a hammer in stead, wear safety glasses OR put the pot in the plastic trash bag before breaking to keep broken bits from flying up. Make sure to sweep area thoroughly afterwards. (Fun alternative if you have a second story: clear all people from the area and toss the pot from a 2nd story window. You can tell I enjoy destruction...just a bit).
2. For the pallet, I liked using Balsa wood strips for the top part, but a harder wood strip in the same size for the back, to add strength. Because I was making several of these it was actually cheaper to do this (the harder wood cost less than balsa), but if you were making just one it would cost less to cut one strip of balsa in two and use it for both top and bottom. I found my pre-cut wood strips at Hobby Lobby.
4. Cut the bottom and top strips to exactly the same length (8 - 10 inches).
5. The original craft called for cutting out the ink wells with a craft knife, but I thought it would be easier to press them in the soft balsa wood in stead (you can see how this turned out in the pictures). It does make for a shallower bowl, so if you want to cut them out with a knife for a deeper ink well, do so during this step. Otherwise, I think it would probably avoid some of the warping I got later to press them after gluing (though I have not tried this) For the area to hold your reeds cut a rectangular strip from near the bottom of the top later of balsa wood...leaving about two inches at the top for your inkwells, as shown below.
7. Glue your top balsa piece to your bottom wood piece...put a book on top to press them pieces together while they dry.
8. To press out your inkwells (if you haven't choosen to cut them in step five), find a hard object with a small rounded surface. I used the handle of a small hammer. You could also use a screwdriver handle or even a marble. Press the rounded object into the balsa wood hard until it makes an indentation. (The example below shows only one layer because I made the mistake of pressing before gluing the top and bottom layers).
This is one step that even a young child can help with. Wha-la...your scribe's pallet is done...now it need some reeds to fill it.
9. Go outside and look for some weedy grass...something long and skinny, not wide and flat. Cut off any "seed heads" and cut into segments just shorter than your reed holder.
10. Last, put a drop of red and black ink in your pallet inkwells, grab your rocks or terra cotta pieces, and start painting hieroglyphics and hieratics!
Day 2: Cuneiform
SOTW Passage Covered
Paragraphs 6 - 9 (Original 3 - 5)
SOTW TEXT NOTE: There were some significant changes to paragraph 5/8 in the Revised version, which you can see here.
On the second day of our lesson we looked at pictures on the page about writing in our Mesopotamia book while we read in SOTW, and found Mesopotamia on our wall map.
ACTIVITY
Afterwards we wrote a message with cuneiform in clay (I had whittled a stylus the night before.) They aren't hard to make...it's just smoothing three sides a stick till they make a triangle. However, you can easily chopsticks or a square dowl for a stylus in stead (while a triangle is a little more accurate, you can do the shapes with the corner of a square too). This blog post, by a teacher who does this every year in her middle school class, has some more great tips. Another blogger did this with gingerbread!
Now, you could use the "alphabet" in SOTW, but just know that what is presented as a cuneiform alphabet is actually, at least in part, Babylonian numbers. Any cuneiform "alphabet" that corresponds exactly with the English alphabet will be somewhat altered, because the Mesopotamian languages did not contain exactly the same sounds as our alphabet, and because most, possibly all of them, were not technically alphabets, but syllabaries (where a symbol usually represented a whole syllable, not a single sound). Regardless, some of the alphabets below are probably at least a little close to the originals.
- Ugaritic Alphabet (c. 1300 BC ) More about it.
- The cuneiform is fairly simple to write, but the one I have is not in alphabetical order, and uses some international symbols for sounds. It doesn't contain all the English letters/sounds so you might have kids make up their own cuneiform letters for the letters they didn't have.
- Old Persian Alphabet (c. 550-486 BC).
- This was created by or under Darius I, who is mentioned in the biblical books of Haggai, Zechariah, Ezra, and Nehemiah (for those supplementing with Bible stories, around Chap 21 of SOTW). It is also not too complex to write. It's also not in alphabetical order, and is presented as a syllabary (but a very simple one...if kids wanted to try out the idea of using a syllabary this would be a good one to do that). Again, it doesn't contain all the English letters.
- Babylonian Alphabet and Numbers (c. ?) and More Babylonian Numerals (c. 2000 BC)
- This has all the English letters, even c (which is redundant with k and s), so it's definitely at best an approximation. These are COMPLEX characters to make, but it is nice to have all of it in alphabetical order without having to mess with syllables. It also has numbers 1-20.
- Sumerian Syllabary (c. 2200 BC)
- First phonetic cuneiform, and kinda complex but older students might enjoy looking at it (symbols were by syllables, so "ba, be, bi, bu" would all be separate alphabetic symbols). Some modern scripts, such as Japanese, are structured similarly. There is a simplified sumerian "alphabet" here though.
One thing to keep in mind is that the characters were imprinted into clay, not drawn into clay. So when you see a symbol with a triangle and a line, this is not meant to be etched into clay exactly like it's shown. The triangle is created by the shape of the stylus. There's a great video with someone demonstrating writing cuneiform here, and it would be helpful to show a portion of this to kids before attempting to do cuneiform.
My son wrote a message to his friend, also doing Story of the World
My styluses...you can't really see the triangle shape on the tip.
We made some other things with the clay after using it for cuneiforms. My son made the vase and I mad the crocodile. (I was
pretty proud of that crock...used the stylus to make the scales on his
back)
Day 3: Papyrus
SOTW READING GUIDE
Paragraphs 10 - 12 (Original 6 - 8)
This is another place where the book has an error. Papyrus was not made by "mashing" papyrus into a pulp. We do make paper today by mashing up wood pulp (a method first discovered in medieval China, with macerated cloth), but this was NOT how it was made by the Egyptians, the first inventors of paper. The Egyptians cut papyrus into thin strips, pounded them flat, soaked them in water, then wove the strips and flattened it even more with stones.
You can see how the Egyptians made papyrus in the video below. They also demonstrate how strong this paper was (really quite tough). It holds up much better than modern paper does, which is why we still have some sheets of papyrus from thousands of years ago (but of course, as the book points out, it doesn't hold up as well as stone, so we don't have as much of it).
WHAT ABOUT ANIMAL SKINS?
While I didn't talk about leather, I was curious if that was used by the Egyptians to write on as well, and I found out that it was when I stumbled on an article about the Oldest/Longest Ancient Egyptian Leather Manuscript Ever Found. I learned that animal skins were "considered a very precious writing material in ancient Egypt. It was the principal writing medium to record holy texts and great historic events as it was more practical than papyrus due to its flexibility and durability." However, papyrus, while less durable in the short term, held up better over time in Egypt's dry climate, where "leather objects quickly perished." They may have perished even more quickly because Egyptians hadn't learned how to tan leather to soften and preserve it, like people to the north of them in Europe had.
ACTIVITY
We did not do an activity related to papyrus. However, there is an activity for making your own "faux papyrus" using paper strips here. I'm also very curious whether you could make any sort of paper, in small amounts, by pounding, weaving and drying regular grass (the wide flat kind). It would not have the same exact properties of papyrus, but it would be a fun experiment to try. I've heard that "fake papyrus" has been made from palm fronds, so if you live where you could get a palm leaf, that would be something fun to try also.
Linking up on A Little Bird Told Me, Blessed MOMdays, The Homeschool Nook, and more great link-ups!
