Satori Smiles

We did this activity right after our Rosetta Stone project, to take advantage of the other half of the black foam board.

What we know of Hammurabi was that he was a king of Babylon (c 1796 BCE – 1750 BCE), who is known for the set of laws called Hammurabi’s Code, the first written codes of law in recorded history. They were written on a over seven foot tall diorite (dark grey igneous rock) stele (tall stone slab). A few examples of his laws were:

• If a man puts out the eye of an equal, his eye shall be put out.
• If anyone commits a robbery and is caught, he shall be put to death.

Sounds pretty severe! He was actually a fair king, much better than the king Shamshi-Adad we’re learning about this week.

Here’s our activity spread out before we started. Images of Hammurabi’s Code of Laws stele, our stele, pen, and a book.

This book, The Rules by Marty Kelley is a silly book with silly illustrations, but Satori loved it, and of course I’ve had to read it four times in the past 24 hours. We’re not very strict parents and Satori is a good girl, so we don’t have too many rules around the house, so this book was actually helpful to read to get us both in the mindset of laying down some rules.

Just as in the original stone, there is a top section with a picture of Hammurabi giving his laws to someone. Satori illustrated Mama in a chair, giving the rules to her standing before the Mama.

Then, I simply had her list all the rules that she could think of!

The Rosetta Stone isn’t just an overpriced foreign language program often marketed in airports and at the mall. For us, it is far more important, for it allowed us a glimpse inside the Egyptian world. The stone itself, created in 196 BCE,  is a black stone with carved text comprised of three translations of a single passage – Egyptian hieroglyphics, demotic, and classical Greek. Discovered in 1799 in Rosetta, Egypt, but not translated until 1822, it allowed us to read the previously undecipherable hieroglyphic writing. Perfect for little 5 year old girls who love to read hieroglyphs!

Here it is sitting in the British Museum. Mama is kicking herself for not going there when we were right next door just four months ago!

I thought it would be fun to make our own project of a Rosetta Stone. But instead of Egyptian demotic and classical Greek, we’d  use the language we knew (English) and one we don’t have memorized (Sumerian cuneiform).  The other day at the office store, I picked up a large black foam board. I cut it in half (the other half was for our next project). I used a scissors and made it roughly in the shape of the Rosetta Stone that is chipped on almost all corners.

Next I used a few free online translation sites to print out a page using the three languages, saying the same  phrase in each: My name is Satori.  Here’s the websites I used:

• Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyph alphabet translator (closest to the hieroglyphs Satori is familiar with)
• Babylonian Cuneiform Alphabet translator

I gathered up all the materials. I got a large image of the Rosetta Stone printed out, my 3-translation sheet, our “Rosetta Stone” foam board, and a book. We re-read Seeker of Knowledge: The Man Who Deciphered Egyptian Hieroglyphs by James Rumford. Satori was so much more interested than the first time we read it – the day I introduced Egyptian writing to her. Since then, she’s learned so much!

Using our translation sheet as a guide, Satori started writing the  phrase “My Name is Satori”. We used a metallic pen so it would s how up nicely on the black board.

We did not forget to make a cartouche around her name. This was one of the important clues that helped translate the hieroglyphs. And see how it is shaped similar to the actual Rosetta Stone?

Today was such a gorgeously beautiful day. The sun was shining, we actually did our lessons out on the deck today. Birds tweeting all around us… Snow still all around, but we basked in the hot sun which made it feel like the perfect spring day…

Story of the World Chapter 6 covered “The Jewish People”. The whole family watched DVDs from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph, Satori enjoying Joseph: King of Dreams the most.

For the related SOTW activity, I had Satori lie down and I traced around her on a large sheet of paper.

Since it was so big, Mama pitched in and helped color in the boring parts like the pants.

And the finished Satori in her Coat of Many Colors!

Chapter Five from Story of the World covered Sumer and King Sargon – the first Sumerian dictator. Some of the Sumerians inventions include the wheel, mathematics based on the number 60, kilns, the plow, and the first superhero, Gilgamesh.

Today we tackled the Sumerian Seal activity outlined in SOTW Activity Guide. This is to demonstrate the fact that in ancient times, most people couldn’t write. So they made their own special seals with their names on it, so they could stamp their “name” when needed.

We did this as a family activity. Here’s Satori rolling flat her piece of clay.

We all carved a pattern in our clay. Satori made a hawk, Dad made a cat, and Mom made a wolf.

Here they are laying out to dry. This is only the first part, but I’m not sure we’ll do the next part. We’re supposed to take wet clay, and press it into this dried seal to make an impression. Then make it into a pendant by making a hole in the top.

If we finish this project, I’ll of course post the results. But somehow, I have a feeling that our wet clay won’t make a very good impression into the above dry seals… I may however, want to redo this as a cool scarab as the project shown in another craft book.

It was Family Craft Night again at Satori’s house! Tonight we tackled several projects.

I have several Ancient Egypt craft books on  hand.

• Ancient Egyptians and their Neighbors (covers Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Nubians and Hittites)
• Ancient Israelites and their Neighbors (covers Israelites, Phoenicians and Philistines)
• Story of the World 1 Activity Guide
• Spend the Day in Ancient Egypt by Linda Honan
• Make History Ancient Egypt by Nancy Fister (out of print, we bought used for $1)

First up was a “Royal Cartouche” project from our Make History Ancient Egypt book. An oval cartouche around Egyptian hieroglyphs means that it is the name of an Egyptian king or god. To do this craft you’ll need: scissors, poster board, markers/colored pencils, white glue, colored craft sand, gold cord or piping, and Popsicle stick (or gold pen).

I cut a piece of poster board measuring 3″ x 6″, rounding off the corners. Then I marked off a 1/4″ border around the edge. Mom did those tasks ahead of time, so the family could just dig in and have fun. Next we drew in our hieroglyph symbols to spell out our name, coloring them in with bright permanent marker.

Afterwards, Mom and Dad very carefully painted in glue around the design, but within the border. We then sprinkled colored craft sand to cover the entire cartouche. Once dry, only Mom had the patience to glue a gold cord around the edge, and wrap a half Popsicle stick around the edge. For Dad and Satori’s cartouche, I used a liquid gold marker to outline it, which I think looks just as nice in person.

Poor Satori’s Royal Cartouche was in the middle, both Mom and Dad didn’t do a good job gluing and spilling sand on hers, the paint dried too quickly, and Dad got lazy and mixed up the orange and blue sand. Otherwise, hers would have looked better.

The picture in the craft book looks perfect, but I knew ours wouldn’t come close to perfection. It was so much fun anyway! If you do this craft carefully, it would look very nice. The sand sparkles in the light.

Next up we did the Scarab Activity in Spend the Day in Ancient Egypt. A scarab is a kind of beetle called a “dung beetle”, but despite that, the Egyptians believed it to be sacred. Lapis lazuli was one of their favorite colors, so we took some turquoise clay to begin our scarabs.

Using some clay modeling tools, we etched in our beetle’s head and body and designs.

For this particular clay, we were able to put it in the oven at 275 degrees for 30 minutes and ended up with our cool little scarabs! This book suggested to poke a whole through them to wear as a necklace. The Make History book had a similar craft, but suggested making it into a neat little stamp to stamp your name.

We then took some gold clay to make the “Ankh Amulet” described in Spend the Day in Ancient Egypt. The anhk is the Egyptian symbol for life, and we are seeing this symbol everywhere now. The Egyptians would wear this as a protective amulet to keep them from harm. They often make the ankh from gold, but we made do with this yellow clay.

A bit more about our Ancient Egypt craft books… We are closely following the SOTW Activity Guide, and plan on doing the cool projects, skipping the not-so-cool ones. So far we’ve gotten some great ideas out of the book! Several history curriculums recommend Ancient Egyptians and their Neighbors. We got our Sugarcube Pyramid activity out of this book, and I hope to do a few more projects next week, like the Overnight Fig Cakes recipe. The Spend the Day in Ancient Egypt is a great book, besides the crafts we did tonight, we got the Egyptian Pleated Gown idea from this book. They also have an awesome, realistic Papyrus activity, some cool Egyptian musical instruments, more recipes, and some Egyptian jewelry we’re looking forward to making if we have time. The Make History book is intimidating, much more involved than a family with a 5 year old can do, but I’m looking forward to the next time we study Egypt in 4 years or so. They feature real photographs of their finished crafts, and they look just amazing.

We actually did this experiment twice, as the results were not what we expected…

After one week, here are the two apple slices. The first one is the “mummified’ apple. The second is one we just left out. The second one looks truer to color! The mummified apple has retained its shape, but the peel has turned black, and the insides discolored. I thought maybe it was because I soaked it in salt water before hand.

So we tried again! We did the same thing, without the salt water soak. Here is our apple slice weighing in at 7/8 oz.

And here’s that same apple almost a week later, weighing in at 1/4 oz. It has lost 5/8 oz due to the dehyrdation of the salt/baking soda mix.

But it still looks black. I think we should have given it a month to see moredecay on the untouched apple slice.

Last month when we did our Ancient Writing in Hieroglyphs and Cuneiform activity, I made sure we made some extras specifically for this experiment.

Ancient Sumerians and Egyptians did their writing on stone or clay tablets, and the Egyptians also used papyrus. To this day, we are able to read the stone/clay tablets, but not much papyrus writing has survived. When asked what she thought would last longer – clay tablet or papyrus, Satori gave the common sense answer, but it was fun to do this experiment anyway.

We used Daddy’s hieroglyph papyrus roll and his cuneiform tablet. By the way, he didn’t do the cuneiform wedges right, I just noticed. It looks like he scraped them in, where he was supposed to just stick in his wedged stick. All the more reason to put them through methods of destruction to see if they will survive!

First, the pieces were submerged in a Nile flood for five minutes.

They both survived, but the ink on our paper was getting smeary.

Our clay tablet was starting to dissolve, as we did not put it in a fire kiln or bake in the sun to make it totally waterproof, luckily we could still read it though.

Next test was to have them back in the hot Egyptian sun for thousands of years. (Oven for half an hour.)

As we took them out, the clay tablet was unchanged, but our paper scroll had crumbled in places and is now barely readable.

Want to see some actual ancient writings that can still be read today? The oldest tablets go back to 3000 BCE. Here’s a Babylonian tablet from 87 BCE that described the arrival of Halley’s comet:

This one was found from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and tells the story of the Babylonian flood and the ark Utnapishti built, very similar to the biblical Noah.

On the other hand, here is a sample of papyrus.

If you are studying Ancient Egypt, I highly recommend the National Geographic Classic Science Archaeology: Pyramid kit by Thames and Kosmos. It ties all of Satori’s interests together: archaeology, hieroglyphs, mummies, and of course pyramids.

It comes well-protected in a perfectly designed box and you’ll find your pyramid and treasures within, archaeologist tools (hammer, chisel, brush, peg), protective goggles, full-color manual, and a 3D paper cross section model. Satori fondly remembers her “paleontologist days” when studying prehistory, so she was so excited to begin excavating!

*READ THE DIRECTIONS* first, or you might miss out on some of the clever surprises! (You may not wish to read further if you want your own kit to be a surprise.)

Click on the image above to get the full detail and you’ll notice hieroglyphs on a certain level of each side of the pyramid. Satori quickly wrote down a translation, she needed no manual, she already had them memorized! These hieroglyphs of course had a few vowels and other letters that used the same translation, so once Satori wrote down the letters, Mama still had to help translate. But overall, this was a very cool puzzle. Satori was so happy that she basically solved it herself. Each side gave a message to tell you if this side was the entrance. Our first side said “TRY AGAIN”.

(There are more pictures, but I don’t want to spoil this kit for the people who want it to be a surprise!) Click “continue reading…” link below.

continue reading…

One of the activities in our Story of the World 1 Activity Guide is to build a pyramid. Their specific activity was to use sand and glue, but we wanted something simpler! So we use sugar cubes, simple yet perfect building blocks for a pyramid. All we needed was one box of sugar cubes (1 lb), some glue, and some cardboard to build it upon. To finish our pyramid off, we also used sand and gold paint.

Last night we had read a few read-along books about pyramids. You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Pyramid Builder and Who Built the Pyramid? So we were familiar with all the many different jobs people had when building a pyramid – so it was fun to describe again these jobs as we prepared our very own pyramid, right down to the capstone.

First off we counted off the base of the pyramid – 36 cubes to build a 6×6 base.

From there we drew a line around our 36 cubes, only to take off the cubes, paint on a thick layer of glue, and then replace the  cubes.

We kept building up, next was a layer of 25 (5×5), 16 (4×4), 9, 4, and finally 1. I reminder Satori to place them tightly together, as the Ancient Egyptians did.

Once done, we painted the pyramid with glue, and sprinkled sand to give it a more authentic sand look. I did not have a more realistic sand color, and we probably would have been fine with keeping it white like limestone. To top it off, we painted the final block gold and set it on top for our capstone.

Now that I think back upon this, it would have been cool if we placed a tiny treasure inside the pyramid, then break into it later! Similar to our second pyramid activity which I’ll be blogging about next.

One of Story of the World’s most famous activities is “Mummifying a Chicken”. My local homeschoolers have dubbed the project “6 Weeks and a Chicken”. I think I’ve dreaded this for almost a year, as we are vegetarians and even if we weren’t, I don’t think I could handle a dead chicken carcass in the house with 3 cats for 6 weeks.

Instead we got the Lift the Lid on Mummies project. It comes with everything we need to prepare a body for mummification, but without an actual dead thing. We get the body, organs, wrappings, canopic jars, death mask, sarcophagus and more.

To proceed, Satori carefully cut open the body to obtain the organs. (She simply lifted the top half of the body and inside were his organs).

The buzzword for the week for Satori is “canopic jar”. (She’s fascinated with these things and includes them in her daily drawings even). These little jars have the head of an Egyptian god and store the mummy’s organs.  We had to build the jar bodies, they are glossy paper rolled up and taped. (They suggest to glue it, but my glue wasn’t holding on the glossy paper, but tape worked perfect). Here is Hapi will be storing the lungs.

Next, we wrapped up the mummy with the bandages. I wish they would have included a teeny bit longer length of wrappings, but with care, we managed to wrap his whole body.

Satori carefully placed the amulets provided (turquoise-colored stickers) between the wrappings.

We carefully placed the death mask on the mummy head and placed him in his sarcaphagus with his cat mummy and canopic jars. Satori is holding up the prayer we read before sealing the coffin with the sticker.

We were both a bit wistful as we sealed his tomb. The mummy was so cool to play with, even some other five year old girls from the neighborhood enjoyed playing with him. I’m sure it won’t be long before a tomb robber discovers the tomb and opens up the coffin…

The Lift the Lid on Mummies project was well worth the investment. Also included was a very informative booklet that talked all about mummies!

Immediately after the above mummification, we set out Mummifying an Apple. This was not a SOTW Activity Project, but is a popular way to mummify a living thing. By just googling “mummify apple”, there are several descriptions of the process.

This was one way to experience the preservation process and see some results! Here I took an apple and cut two slices out of its middle.

After Satori scooped out its “organs” (apple seeds), we soaked it for a few minutes in a salt bath.

Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have given it a bath, as we then weighed the slice we were going to mummify. I’m sure extra moisture was weighed in.

Satori then got some math practice in as she measured half a cup of baking soda and half a cup of salt. After mixing it, we completely covered our special apple slice.

Day one. Mummified apple is covered in salts, we will take a look at both in one week!