Ivan Cabrera
ARTH3311
Prof. Trofimova
2/2/18

Assignment #1

What I learned in class was a variety of things that relate to writing throughout history. Some things that we talked about were cave paintings & understanding different texts such as hieroglyphics. Throughout the class, we saw four videos & learned a lot of new things related to writing.
The first video we saw shows archeologists who found cave paintings that was drawn in the caves 15,000 years ago. They theorized that either cavemen or some early form of humans could have done those paintings. The other video which was the second video shows the top 10 cave paintings.
The top 10 paintings in the video showed unique & fascinating designs. Paintings like the Laas Gaal cave painting & the Magura painting are two examples from the 10 that stood out to me the most due to its intriguing design & use of colors within the paintings. After that, we then saw a video that talks about the Rosetta Stone.
In the video, the guy talks about the stone saying that it was very hard to understand. It took scholars 20 years to finally understand it. The Rosetta Stone consists of 3 different languages, Hieroglyphics, Demotic & Ancient Greek. They make replicas of the stone every couple of years so that people can go see it and touch it. We learned some keywords as well. They were Petroglyphs, Pictographs, Ideographs & Phonograms.
The last thing we saw talked about the Book of the Dead. It’s an ancient Egyptian funerary text that was used around 1550 BCE to 50 BCE. It aided the scribe to obtain immortality. The text was written by the pharoahs.