Sunday Links: Origins of Writing

Every Sunday, I try to find ten links that aren’t Wikipedia dealing with a subject that I teach.  This week I tackle the origins of writing, in Cuneiform, Hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, and Chinese characters.  In many ways, this will be quite difficult, because I have to find three links for each — so there will actually be twelve links in this edition.

Let’s take the task on:  Cuneiform first.

1. Cuneiform at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Unfortunately, the websites to “write like a Babylonian” and “write like an Egyptian” are both broken.  Argh.

2. Ancient Scripts has a Cuneiform Page.

3.  And here’s the Sumerian Language Page, run by Sumerian.org.

So that’s a good beginning.

Hieroglyphics next.

1. Let’s find an image of the Rosetta Stone, together with an explanation of the translation.  That was easy.

2. Here’s a hieroglyphics translator / creator thingie.

3. and a chart of the core hieroglyphic alphabet.

Chinese characters

1. Here’s an online Chinese dictionary and character geneaology.  It turns out that when studying Chinese characters, you not only need the symbol as currently written, but you need to know something of its history, and how it’s been written through the centuries.  Interesting.

2. At Omniglot, a website devoted to the world’s writing systems, a page on Chinese Characters.  (plus pages on Cuneiform [not very good] and hieroglyphics!)

3. Photos of a Shang Dynasty-era bronze pot, which can be used to talk about early Chinese Characters and the emergence of Chinese metallurgy.

Phoenician Alphabet

1. Behold, a phoenician organization with a page on their alphabet.

Sunday Links: Homer the poet

The goal every Sunday is to find ten or more links that aren’t Wikipedia which do a reasonably good job of explaining a historical event.  Ideally, I try to find three images, three secondary sources, and three primary sources.  This week, we delve into Homer, the ancient Greek poet. This one is hard, because I have to maneuver around Homer Simpson, who is a much larger cultural hero on the Internet.

1.

Homer, in a 5th century BC bust

This is of course the classic image of Homer.  It comes from Ancient Greece.com, which seems to be a reasonably reputable site.  Comapring what’s written here with what I know about Homer, I don’t see any glaring factual errors.  The one complaint that I have with the site is that it seems to have been written by someone with a less-than-perfect command of the English language.  So far, so good.

2.Behold, another excellent link, this time a painting of Homer being crowned as a divinity by the muse of poetry, while all the great poets of succeeding centuries look on in approval and wonder.  Will students get this — that by 1827 AD, Homer’s reputation was such that people wrote odes and created art celebrating the achievements of a poet who’d live more than 2000 years ago?

Apotheosis of Homer

What else?

3. Since they’re copyrighted images, I don’t want to display their modern cartoons directly on my site, but Cartoonstock.com has some moderately funny images associated with Homer.  Some of them are even available for sale on mugs, t-shirts and suchlike.

That does it for images. What about secondary sources?

4. Mythography has a pretty good bio of him, and the English writing is reasonably good.

5. Yahoo.com has an education site with cliffs’ notes-style analyses of major works of literature; here’s the one for the Iliad, along with the information about the poet and his time.  Now even if my students don’t have time to read the whole poem, I can direct them to a summary… Hmmm.

6. Here’s a site that treats Homer as the nominal author of poems composed by the collective wisdom of Mycenaean Greece, and explains why that context is important.

Primary sources?

7. Here’s a gentleman on YouTube who has a fragment of ancient Greek music played on a lyre, attributed to Homer.

8. A sample of someone reading/singing the opening of the Iliad.

9. A translation into English of the Iliad by Walter Leaf, 1902.

10. Primary sources: Iliad, Odyssey and Homeric Hymns at Project Gutenberg.

Overall grade: A-.  Good access to primary and secondary sources about Homer, specifically, as well as to his texts.  I think that one would have a harder time convincing students that “homer” wasn’t a real person so much as the conflation of a thousand-year oral tradition in one person, but that’s not vital for eighth and ninth graders, anyway.

Consider checking out earlier blogs in this series on:

• Galileo and the Copernican Revolution
• Emperor Henry IV at Canossa
• The Roman Army

Addendum: Due to graduation, I didn’t post this until the Tuesday after, but I’ve backdated it to Sunday, so that it’s easy to find in the calendar view by clicking on Sundays.

Sunday: The Roman Army

Every Sunday, I try to bring you a set of ten links that aren’t from Wikipedia that would serve to help a student begin a paper on a given topic, or understand a topic slightly better than before.  My goal isn’t necessarily highly-academic sites; it’s simply a collection of images, video, and text to help a student grasp a subject more successfully.  Previous topics have included Henry IV at Canossa, and Galileo’s championing of the Copernican Revolution. This week, my goal is to find ten sites related to the structure of the Roman Army.

Sunday WebQuest: Galileo

Last week, I looked at Canossa and the conflict between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV. This week, let’s look at another struggle between Church and rival, namely science.  Here, we’re going to examine the events of Galileo’s showdown with the Church.

Sunday Webquest: Canossa

My ninth graders will be learning about Canossa this week — the Emperor Henry IV’s pilgrimage to the side of Pope Gregory VII, who was hiding at the castle of Canossa in northern Italy. Henry wanted to show atonement for crossing Pope Gregory VII on the matter of the Investiture Controversy. Gregory made him stand in the snow for three days before forgiving him. The Sunday Project is to find ten web links that aren’t Wikipedia to help students better understand Canossa and the events leading up to it and following it. Here’s what I found:

• 1)One of the first things was an image of a painting painted in 1862 of Henry IV, standing outside the castle. I like starting with Image search in Google, because it gives me instant access to a picture that a student can associate in his or her mind with an event. Here, Henry IV is penitent and… wait a minute! He doesn’t look penitent at all. A student can get the idea that in the 1860s, Germans wanted a strong German history — so this painting is propaganda for that strong Germany. Henry is dressed as a penitent, but he wasn’t really penitent. Interestingly enough, Adolf Hitler forced German churches in the 1930s to join a unified structure under the authority of his own Reichsbishop. Talk about lay investiture! 
• 2)I found this simple cartoon of Henry IV at Canossa, which I quite like. It’s relatively neutral, in that Henry’s face doesn’t show, and you’re left with an image of a monk at a castle door. This is a good image for introducing younger students to the concept of Canossa. 
• 3)Here’s a later image, of Henry with a bunch of friends at Canossa. Again, ties into the idea of German nationalism, because the Church’s account is that he went alone; here, though, he’s visiting with a bunch of friends and boon companions. Pope Gregory VII had excommunicated Henry IV; he shouldn’t have had any friends at all. Yet here he does have friends; ergo, Germans are stronger when they stand together. Nationalist, but not as strongly as the painting. 
• 4)Here’s a medieval image of him, that shows Henry IV as the king. This is important, because until now we’ve only seen him actually AT Canossa. Now we can know that he and his successors were royal patrons of the arts, and they had no problem depicting Henry as the Holy Roman Emperor. 
• 5)Now we need to show the other player: Pope Gregory VII. Here he is from the Saints’ Directory, in a stained glass window. The Church still thinks highly enough of Pope Gregory, that they make his image into large and expensive stained glass windows. Do we do the same for Henry IV? 
• 6)Having a primary source or two is always helpful. Here’s Henry IV’s letter to Gregory, written a year or so before the excommunication. 
• 7)And here is Pope Gregory’s response. 
• 8)Here’s a quick discussion of the Investiture Controversy in general, so that a student who doesn’t understand the textbook has another source to look at. 
• 9)Did you know that it’s possible to do a timeline search in Google News? Here’s a whole bunch of Investiture Controversy links scattered right through the first few centuries of the first millennium. 
• 10)And here’s the resolution to the conflict: the Concordat of Worms. It’s a pair of joint decrees by Pope Callixtus II, and Emperor Henry VEduc. So the matter of Canossa wasn’t really settled for fifty years, and a generation after Canossa.

So. There’s enough here in this list that a student could get a sense of what Canossa was about, but probably not learn the material without the help of a teacher to explain and guide him or her through it. A good start, but probably not enough to explain it thoroughly, or do it independently. This week’s grade: B-