Sanskrit, English, and Greek: Recreating a Rosetta Stone

And the process continues! I think when it comes to translating languages or even just basic communicating, the process is never really finished. Even though each group created a Rosetta Stone, a finished product of translation between 3 languages, there were still imperfections, places to improve, things to add in. And so this is our process went…

We received the talipot palm leaf from the ancient Indian group. Thankfully, it was very legible and not terribly difficult to inscribe. We originally knew that it was written in Sanskrit, so that was our starting point. We noticed that there was a line, almost continuous, running through the text, but we didn’t know whether it went on the top or the bottom. Like Dr. Burton said, when using new languages, we have to reorient ourselves, whether we read the language right to left, clockwise, or upside down. From there, we tried to look up the translation character for character or word for word, but there are thousands of characters for Sanskrit, each connoting a different sound which then creates a word. We scrapped that idea and tried to find a specific authentic phrase they might have used. I knew, because Rachel is in our blogging group, that the Vedas were a sacred scriptural text very prominent in ancient Aryan culture. We then looked up the Vedas and found that the inscription came from the last line of the Rig Veda Book One, Hymn One. The phrase looked like this…

(check out this website for more on the Vedas’ history, content, and translation)

Then we looked online for a site that had translated the phrase. (We ended up  this site, which offers a full translation of the Rig Veda for the use of students—how convenient! ) The site translated the phrase in English as:

Be to us easy of approach, even as a father to his son:

Agni, be with us for our weal

To better understand this phrase, I researched the Rig Veda. The word ‘rig’ comes from the Sanskrit word ‘rik’ meaning praise, and the word ‘veda’ comes from the Sanskrit word ‘vid’ meaning knowledge or to see a vision. Together, ‘Rig Veda’ means ‘knowledge of praise’ so the  majority of the text is devoted to praising different gods. In this case, they were appealing to Agni, the Lord of Fire.

Our next task was translating it into Greek. We lucked out on this one. Because Greek is not a dead language, it was easy to find translation sights for the text. This is one particular site (www.translatum.gr) that translated the phrase for us; it looked like this:

Να είναι εύκολο να μας όσον αφορά την προσέγγιση, έστω και ως πατέρας στο γιο του: Αγνή, να είναι μαζί μας για την ευτυχία μας

 However, to check the authenticity of the text (and just for kicks), we put the phrase into GoogleTranslate. It read in English:

Make it easy for us to approach, even as a father to his son: Agni, be with us for our happiness.

As you can see, there were some discrepancies. The first phrase "make it easy for us to approach" is not quite the same. The Greek version is simplified and less poetic, but with a similar meaning. The word “weal” (which means prosperity and well-being) turned into “happiness”. Also, the site translated the god's name Agni letter by letter, but the Greeks had their own god of fire: Hephaestus or in Greek Ήφαιστος.  So even though we could access a site to help translate, the translation wasn’t perfect and needed adjustments to be authentic. 

So by this time, we had all of our translations, and we needed to carve it into the clay. But before we could carve the clay, we needed to mold the clay. The word moldable is a bit deceiving though. It makes the process sound easy and forgiving. And I suppose it is in comparison to carving to stone, but it took a good half an hour to an hour to even get to a place where we could start engraving. I don’t know whether it was the clay we bought or whether I’ve been spoiled with Play-Doh my whole life, but it was very stiff and required to be doused in water before it would stop crumbling. (We even had an unfortunate accident where our water tipped over and spilled all over the table and even a computer) But I suppose it’s the price we pay. I guess the more moldable and adjustable the medium (like wax or clay) the more messy and fragile it is. Whereas, the group with stone didn’t have to prepare their medium or mold it, so it was much more permanent. This time around we decided to make our clay tablet a circle, reminiscent of the Phaistos disc found as one of the few remains at the Temple of Phaistos during the times of the ancient Minoans.

While engraving, I found that the Greek was easier to engrave than the Sanskrit. Greek contains more straight lines while Sanskrit is more ornamental and curved. Sanskrit is more accustomed to the medium of pen and some kind of paper while Greek is more accustomed to a medium like clay, which has engravings. So the medium a civilization uses also affects the look or iconographic style of the language. The miscellaneous group mentioned this when they had to carve Mayan hieroglyphics (a very detailed text) into stone while Ogham is comprised of straight lines, something easy to engrave in stone. And then Blaine was kind enough to fire the tablet for us after we were done. As he mentioned in class, clay is perishable and he was afraid to over bake it and have it crack or even have it melt, which emphasizes the fragility of the medium.

So at the end of the day we had wet sticky hands and a finished clay tablet. But more importantly we had an understanding of the depths of knowledge and language in the context of a distant civilization. We had a knowledge of the work and the sacrifice of these ancient cultures to preserve language, something we all take for granted.