Ogham

Being in the miscellaneous group, my civilization, the ancient Welsh, was one of the few with any form of a written language. Although the Welsh adopted the Latin alphabet, before that they used the Irish alphabet Ogham, a rune type alphabet mainly used for engraving in stone. (For more info on Ogham, check out this post I did a few weeks ago.)

Engraving in stone our own phrase in Ogham was an interesting process to say the least...

For this process, we had to find an ancient Welsh saying, find out how to write it in Ogham, and then engrave it into stone. My part in this was getting the stone and chisel and doing the actual chiseling. This process taught me a few interesting things:

• The process of getting rock suitable for carving is pretty hard, even with modern hardware and landscaping stores. Some was too hard, some was so soft it would have eroded away around the engraving, some was too brittle and it would break if hit with a chisel, and some was just too expensive. I'm sure the ancient Welsh faced these sorts of problems too, but eventually, just as I did, found a type of stone that worked the best for what they needed.
• Figuring out what tools would work best for the job was also a difficult process. We went through the ideas of using a screwdriver, a utility knife, a dremel tool, but eventually we found that a simple masonry chisel worked the best for what we needed.
• Although this was to be expected, I got better and faster at the chiseling the more I did. Just as a kindergartner learning to write starts off very slowly with large, sloppy letters, I started off very slowly and with crooked and imprecise lines. Dr. Burton made the comment in class about elementary school children learning to write Ogham in ancient Wales, and although writing in stone is inherently harder than our modern system, I imagine it would have been a similar process learning to write.
• It is actually really gratifying writing in stone. It's a lot cooler to look at a giant stone with writing at it and say "I did that" than it is to look at a paper written in pencil and say "I did that."

Now here are some fun pictures:



Check back in a few days to hear about how chiseling Mayan hyrogliphs in stone goes...