3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

For over 5,200 years humans have used writing as a record for political, administrative, social, religious, and scholarly pursuits. Over millennia diverse scripts have been written, inscribed, carved, impressed, and painted on a variety of objects such as papyrus, stone, ivory, clay, leather, wax, rope, paper, metal, bone, wood, and other mediums. Today, the practice of writing has primarily shifted to the digital world. Computers are often the preferred way for people to “write.” In this course students will be invited to critically examine relationships between scribes, craftsmen, writing, and materials. The goal of the course is for students to recognize how writing has shaped religious and political movements, and aided bureaucratic endeavors from the invention of writing around 3200 B.C. to the present day. In the first part of the semester we will explore the emergence of writing in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica. In the second half of the course students will explore how the act of writing transitioned from hand written manuscripts, to printed books, and now digitized texts. We will explore the way that computers and social media have changed the way that people interact with writing. The seminar will include lecture, discussion, museum fieldtrips, and experimental archaeology labs to investigate and engage with the materiality of clay cuneiform tablets, Egyptian papyrus, Roman wax writing boards, and more!