Tag Archives: History

A little message for Sargon!

cuneiform.jpg

Antonia wanted to make a clay cuneiform tablet.  It took her a little while to get the hang of printing rather than drawing and to strike the balance between representation and signs.  The tablet above would seem an apt message for Sargon, whom we have been studying, and almost any number of other leaders, past and present.  It reads, from top left to bottom right:  Have Fun (fireworks); No Fighting (a man and an explosion); Really Do Not Fight (spears lying down); Go Play (a slide).

Antonia is now enjoying the Story of the World books by Susan Wise Bauer, and I am glad that she is getting into history at last.  We have not necessarily been working through the book in order.  During our trip to India we did the Indian sections from all four books.  We have done some parts of Roman history when we went to Rome, some Chinese history when she began studying Chinese.  But right now, globally, we are working on the first book.  I usually have a web browser to hand as we are reading so I can dig up more illustrations and we discuss as we go along.  Then we do miscellaneous projects, if we feel like it, like the tablet above or further research.  Today we learned about Ziggurats and the legend of the Tower of Babel.  Antonia reads the stories in the books and I read the documentary text.  We spent quite a while mastering the geography of the places we are studying and the dating system.  We are both enjoying ourselves.

Small advances in literacy

Here are a couple of things we’re going to be working on that I think will be a help to Antonia’s literacy in the long-term.

Greek letters.  They’re used in a lot of mathematical and scientific contexts, they’re easy and fun to learn when you’re young, and if you don’t learn them you will one day finding yourself reading passages like: “(shape) over d (unknown symbol) (other shape) equals the ultimate answer; where (shape) is the Infinity Constant  and (other shape) is the hypotenuse of the space-time continuum”.   In other words, you will have enough problems to be going on with, without having to keep shape and other shape straight in your mind.

I found the Open University’s set of applets for learning the Greek letters to be very nice and efficient.  The one on trying to put together Greek words at the end is just a bonus for our current purposes.

Roman numerals.   These might be a mere curiosity in some cultures.  True, they often appear decoratively on clocks, but in the end, most of us go by position, rather than reading the numbers.  In France though, it’s customary to express the centuries in Roman numerals.  ‘XVIIeme siecle’ is the 17th Century and so on.  That’s a nice little addition to the already pressing need to keep straight the idea that the17th Century belongs with the 1600s.  Antonia has nearly reached the age where she will find it helpful to have instant recognition of all the numerals up to XXI.

I was surprised that I couldn’t find any nice applets for teaching kids the Roman numerals from scratch so I’m resorting to good old-fashioned flashcards.  The first 8 have the individual numerals I, V, X, L, C, D and M.  The next set have I to XXI with the range of years corresponding to the century on the back.  The last set are more individual numerals for building numbers with.

Journey to Lhassa

I’m on schedule with my translation work but not ahead. Writing about exhaustion is exhausting. This evening I took a little break to look at a National Geographic DVD about Tibet. These DVD’s came free with a Sunday edition of a British newspaper, and they seem to be circulating around the ex-pat community. Our mothers all give them to us because they think we’re so isolated! (?)

The book I’m translating is not set in Tibet, but it is in the Tibetan cultural zone, and I thought it would be interesting to see some film of the area. It turned out the DVD was orientated towards human interest rather than landscapes, and towards the experience of non-Tibetans in particular. I though this rather strange in a National Geographic film, but maybe I’m being naive. It seemed a bit low budget, and rather inclined to preserve the Mystery Of Tibet aura, rather than enlighten the viewers.

Once I got over my disappointment, I did get quite engrossed in the first human interest story. For most of the 19th century, Tibet was closed to foreigners, but that didn’t stop them trying to get in, usually for reasons that had little to do with fascination for Tibetan culture. Spies, conquerors and missionaries just about sums it up. The Russians and the British were squaring off on either side of the Himalayas. The very existence of a country called Afghanistan is another product of this now little-known history.

nainsingh.gifThe first story on the DVD, about Nain Singh, the Pundit, was truly remarkable. He was born in the Himalayan foothills at a time when the British ruled India. He was recruited to travel through Tibet to Lhassa, carrying out geographical surveying on the way. His tools were a carefully calibrated walking pace, some modified prayer beads for counting his paces, and some measuring equipment concealed in a prayer wheel. He wandered quietly into Tibet with the trading caravans, stayed in Lhassa and wandered quietly back out again, with his information. If he had been caught he would have been killed, nevertheless, he could just as easily have died from the conditions he encountered.

alexandria_david-neelinlhasa.gifThe other Tibetan explorer I admire didn’t make it into this DVD. She came along just a little too late. But she has the advantage of having been a true proponent of Tibetan culture, whose journey to Lhassa was a genuine pilgrimage. I enjoyed reading her travel writings on my first trip to India and Nepal, while waiting for planes and things. Her name was Alexandra David-Neel, she was born in Paris, and ended her life not far from where I now live, in Digne-les-Bains. She was to all intents and purposes a European Tibetan Bhuddist and performed the ceremonies usually expected of a traveling lama in the Himalayan villages she passed through. She also made it in and out without carnage. I emphasise this point because the second ‘hero’ of the National Geographic DVD failed in this respect.

History is full of amazing things, people and places, but often only a few of them are at the forefront of our minds. In particular, the achievements of women and non-westerners tend to fall by the wayside. I was glad to learn of a new one and be reminded of another … also the battle for Tibet goes on, while most of us know little about it.

PS. Speaking of Westo-centrism, I had to laugh at the National Geographic highlighting the point that the only use the Tibetans had found for the wheel was in the prayer wheel. If they’re going to go to the trouble of mentioning that, they might also draw people’s attention to the fact that wheeled transport would be bloody useless in Himalayan conditions. Just in case the viewers are lacking enough experience of such places to figure that out. But I suppose it’s part and parcel of the ‘strange and primitive people’ presentation.