The Epic of Gilgamesh and Gingerbread Cuneiform: Studying Mesopotamia

My teenager's combination World History/Art History study (that I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to record on her high school transcript...) is a TON of fun. We read the history and the art history, study the major artworks, read some literature or mythology, do something immersive, and write about it. I love it, and so far it seems pretty teenager-friendly, too!

My favorite parts of her Mesopotamia unit were listening to The Epic of Gilgamesh (the teenager ships Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and I can't say that she's wrong), envisioning the Ishtar Gate (not to be confused with the Gates of Ishtar, a Swedish metal band), figuring out the Sumerian genealogy of gods and goddesses (always a hit with my mythology-obsessed kid), and making this gingerbread cuneiform.

The idea--and the gingerbread recipe!--come from this Edible Archaeology post. We also followed the author's suggestion to use a disposable bamboo chopstick as a stylus, which led to a whole adventure of eating at several local Asian restaurants over the course of a couple of weeks, since every restaurant we went to happened to have the separated chopsticks with round ends, not the snap-apart ones with square ends!

Finally, we were met with success--and absolutely DELICIOUS ramen--at this little place tucked into an apartment complex behind the grocery store near the mall:

With the proper bamboo chopsticks and a batch of gingerbread dough, we were ready to write!

We did not follow the author's highly ambitious example of copying a large cuneiform tablet, because WHOAH. Instead, we cut small squares, then used the stylus to copy some of the examples from my teenager's world history textbook:

A chopstick makes a PERFECT stylus!

Baked, the impressions still showed perfectly!

Cuneiform sign meaning "god" or "sky"

Cuneiform sign meaning "day" or "sun"

The student scribe takes an art break!

older Cuneiform sign meaning "barley." Doesn't it look like barley?

Since we did this project right before Christmas, we went ahead and used this dough to also make gingerbread cookies, and the kids made their gingerbread houses. Eleven years into this beloved tradition, I'm now a devotee of melted sugar as glue, and I still think the houses look messy and gross, but nevertheless, they bring me joy:

A lot of hands-on history projects are just fun little craft projects that don't teach a ton about history; if you want your hands-on history project to be valuable for history, and not just a thematically-related activity, you do have to be vigilant. When the kids were very little, for instance, letting them build Egyptian pyramids out of sugar cubes didn't teach them anything about the history of Egypt, but it was a good STEM project and they loved it. But having them create salt dough maps of Egypt and paint and label them was also fun, and reinforced some useful information about Egypt that we still know, such as the fact that Upper Egypt was south and Lower Egypt was north because that's the way the Nile flows, and that the Delta is shaped the same as the Greek letter. 

There's nothing wrong with doing thematically-related but non-valuable projects, even with older homeschoolers--my teenager created this gingerbread Stonehenge during her Astronomy study, learning little about Stonehenge but a decent amount about gingerbread construction and hand-building, and it was fun! But this gingerbread cuneiform, we found, taught us a LOT about cuneiform, and therefore about Mesopotamia. We were all surprised to see how exactly the square stylus recreated the cuneiform, and how well the imprints stayed when baked. You wouldn't be able to recreate that nearly so easily by drawing the figures, but you could get a LOT of cuneiform onto even a hand-sized piece of clay, and that clay would be portable, durable, and virtually immortal. 

That's a lot of knowledge gained for oneself while also decorating cookies, drinking eggnog, and listening to Christmas music!

We've spiraled through history throughout our homeschool years, or done interest-led unit studies non-chronologically, so I've built up a lot of Mesopotamia resources. Here are some of what we've enjoyed over the past dozen years:

• irrigation activity. Irrigation was critical to the development of Mesopotamian agriculture! Here's an idea for how to model an irrigation system. I think it would be cool to use chia seeds so you could build an actual working model!
• map of known ziggurats. Research these via YouTube or Google Images, place them in your salt dough map, glue thumbnail images to a wall map, flyover them in Google Earth, etc.
• Mesopotamia flashcards. Use these flashcards for matching or memory work. 
• popsicle stick war machines. If you read Story of the World (which you should!), you'll encounter Sargon the Great. You can use popsicle sticks to model some of the war machines that he used.
• Royal Game of Ur. You can't study Mesopotamia without playing this game found in a tomb in Ur!
• sexagesimal system. Mesopotamians counted in Base 60, something that you can still see reflected today in activities like measuring time (60 seconds, 60 minutes) and circles (360 degrees). Here's a starting point for researching the sexagesimal system, but I've found some great activities in books over the years that I pull out occasionally for math enrichment.
• Treasures of the UCLA Library: Cuneiform Tablets. My teenager and I watched this short video before beginning our side-hustle as cuneiform scribes. 
• write your name in cuneiform. This is a fun way to get just a taste of cuneiform writing
• Ancient Egyptians and Their Neighbors: An Activity Guide. This book has a good recipe for sebetu bread. Read more about sebetu and Mesopotamian recipes here. 
• The Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Eyewitness Mesopotamia. Eyewitness books and Smithsonian Handbooks were the kids' JAM when they were little!
• The Lifeboat that Saved the World. The author is one of the Mesopotamia curators at the British Museum!
• Story of the World, Volume 1. You must listen to the audiobook of this, because Jim Weiss!

And the beloved spines of our current World History/Art History study:

• Archaeology: The Essential Guide to Our Human Past
• Duiker's World History
• Gardner's Art through the Ages
• and lots and lots of images found via Google Images or downloaded from museum digital databases

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

A Dragon Quilt for a Dorm Room Bed

I almost had this quilt project well-organized.

I mean, I started it in July, with the intent to give it as a Christmas gift!

And then I finished about 90% of it, still in July! I did all the taxing piecing, and basted the batting and backing fabric to the quilt top. All I had left to do by the end of the month was applique/quilt the dragon to the quilt, then stitch the back-to-front binding.

So obviously that's what I was doing in a panic on December 24th...

Why, yes, completing a project in the same month that I begin it IS one of my 2023 New Year's Resolutions! I'll keep you in the loop about how it goes!

I got so much done in July because I was able to take advantage of my partner and one teenager swanning off to Peru for two weeks and the other teenager having, you know, an active social life and a part-time job, etc., leaving me, with no social life and no part-time job and no vacation out of the country, home alone in silence. 

Mental note that when my second kid leaves for college, as well, I should probably try to make some friends.

It was good, though, that I had so many uninterrupted hours to work, because some of these techniques were new to me. Here's the link for my dragon quilt inspiration. This was my first time using fusible interfacing as a template--

--which involves cutting pieces from my fabric stash--

--then ironing them to the interfacing--

--then zigzagging them in place--

--and then cutting and ironing some more!

Spots was, as usual, of great help:

She's pissed off because it's a drive-in night so she wasn't allowed outside. That's where the mean cars live!

My photo editing software automatically organizes my photos in chronological order, and it must have access to the timestamps for each photo, as well, because a funny thing happened with my catalog of these photos. I lent my partner my nice camera for their trip, so when he got back all those photos just fed into my program along with all the shitty cellphone pics I'd been taking, to such an extent that when we were clearly taking photos simultaneously, our photos interlaced in the catalog!

So while I was finishing up piecing the dragon's body onto my template--

--my teenager was sitting on a curb somewhere in Peru and eating an ice cream cone:

By the time I got that wing finished, several hours later--

--she was standing on the shore of Lake Titicaca!

And late that evening, when I'd finally gotten all of those interfaced scraps pieced together and had only the dinosaur's spikes left to cut out--

--she was enjoying a delicious dinner:

Here is exactly where I was in the process on the day they came home from Peru:

And there the project remained until December 24th. In other news, WHY does my sewing machine always do some random funky wonky thing every single time I'm panic sewing on a deadline? Do not look at the stitching that I used to quilt this dragon, because from the backside it looks like shit. I kept adjusting the freaking tension, I rethreaded the needle forty times, I changed the needle, I did everything but pray to the goddamned sewing machine, and I still have no idea why it wouldn't give me nice stitching on the back.

Whatever. It's far from perfect, but it IS finished!

The younger kid thinks it's cheezy that I chose a piece whose print looked like the dragon's eye, but I love it!

...and that's all the photos you get of just the quilt without the dog walking all over it.

She is very helpful, yes?

Fortunately, she only walked all over it in snowy paws, not muddy paws, so all I had to do was toss it in the dryer when I was done.

And that's the last big project until I drive my kid to Ohio, unless I get around to sewing her the matching laptop and ipad and phone cases that I bought the zippers for back in October... which I'm NOT going to get around to doing, ahem.

After all, I'll need something to fill my lonely hours while she's gone!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, confrontations with gross men, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Team Mouse on the Christmas Tree

 

The Nutcracker battle is fought not just on the stage, but also on the Christmas tree this year!

And Team Mouse is finally winning!

I bought these super cute felt Mouse and felt Officer patterns thinking that they'd make adorable gifts for the other Mice and Officers in my teenager's Nutcracker casts. I only thought that because I sew by hand so rarely that I had completely forgotten how time consuming it is, oops!

First, you cut out all the tiny pattern pieces:

Then you figure out what color you want everything to be. I still have plenty of felt wool scrippy scraps (I just checked my gmail, and I originally bought this felt way back in 2017--definitely time to finish using it up!), and this kind of small felt figure is the exact perfect use for them. Wool felt is much more beautiful than acrylic felt, and has such a nicer texture, that it's worth it to use it in a project where both of those features are really highlighted.

Cutting out all the little felt pieces wasn't super fun because I was too cheap to go out and buy a proper pair of tiny scissors, but I did get to use my favorite heat-erasable Frixion pens to trace most of the patterns, and that's never not thrilling:

Finally, just spend a million hours hand-stitching the cutest little Mouse Soldier in the world!

Um, I did NOT end up making felt Mice and Officers for every kid in my kid's casts. I did make a different present for just the Team Mouse kids, but it was a lot quicker and easier than hand-sewn felt ornaments!

I do think this sewing would go a lot more quickly the second time, now that I know what I'm doing, and I DO have another Mouse and an Officer already cut out and ready to go. Frankly, though, I think I need to have an appointment with my optometrist first, because I'm not sure I've got the eyes for hand-sewing anymore...

You Should Read Glitter Up the Dark

Because there is so much new music to be discovered, and so much old music to look at through a different lens.

Glitter Up the Dark is a history of some of the musicians who have used music to subvert the cultural gender binary. It shouldn't be surprising that music is often a tool of transgression and progression, but we so often don't think deeply about what we enjoy, and it's easy to simply bop along to the pleasant beat of what we like without putting any thought into the cultural work that music is doing. 

I spent a lot of time in grad school studying how various artists and writers in the medieval period, in particular, subverted gender roles in their works, so this subject is always something that I'm interested in reading more about. And I love music, but I'm not terribly thoughtful about it, so it was interesting to see how some of my favorite music is contextualized through the lens of gender.

Starting with... okay, did anyone else read Cry to Heaven during a weirdly impressionable time in their young life? 

This book was SO weird, and blew my little mind at the exact same time and in the exact same way that Flowers in the Attic also blew my little mind.

WHY did we all end up reading Flowers in the Attic by the age of twelve, by the way? Like, I know nobody was supervising me and that's how I read and watched an absolute ton of inappropriate media, but wasn't somebody supervising YOU?!?

Anyway, that's where I first learned what a castrato was (and I learned a LOT more than that, ahem, although that's neither here nor there), that very specific form of non-consensual body modification and genital mutilation that Italy was obsessed with between the mid-16th century and 1900 or so. So for nearly 500 years, Italians surgically created a distinctive third gender expression just so their music would sound pretty.

Or, just let women sing in your church choirs?

Spoiler alert: they didn't even do that. Eventually, Pius X just said that they could start letting boys sing in their church choirs instead. Sister Act would have been so much better!

I was monologuing all this to Will, and showed her the 1902 or 1904 recording of Alessandro Moreschi, to date I think the only castrato whose voice we have:

1902 is VERY old for a recording, so reasonably, Will asked about the first ever voice recording. We both sort of thought that it's Thomas Edison, but it's NOT! It's inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who in April 1860 tested out his phonoautogram by singing a French nursery rhyme into it. The device wasn't ever even intended to have an audio output, but the recording was re-discovered in 2008 and sent to a lab that was able to construct an audio output for it.

The first recording using one of Edison's devices that still exists wasn't made until 1878!

This hour-long segue seven pages into the book's Introduction is perhaps why it takes me so long to get through non-fiction books...

I mostly picked this book up to read about artists I didn't already know, but I was also really interested to read about artists like Elvis and the Beatles, who many of their contemporary critics saw as effeminate. Contemporary accusations of subversion have long been subsumed by their popularity over time, although I can sort of see it if you focus on the artists as objects of the female gaze; once upon a time, it was only women who were looked at and objectified. Other subversive works are hidden in plain sight, or clumsily redacted--the original lyrics to Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" were "Tutti frutti, good booty."

Speaking of music that was subversive to its cultural contemporaries but is considered canonically classical now, my teenager is currently a few months into a huge David Bowie kick, which has gotten me interested in all things glam rock. I've had Marc Bolan's "Cat Black" on some kind of obsessive repeat--

--after discovering it through this book, even though I've long had several T. Rex songs on my favorites playlist. "Cosmic Dancer," in particular, is on heavy rotation in my favorites, but I always assumed the singer was female. 

But he's not! Check out the outfits in this T. Rex Top of the Pops appearance:

The pants! The vests! The go-go boots! The dancers!

And then just a year later, we've got our own beloved Starman also playing Top of the Pops:

What a time to be alive!

Glitter Up the Dark's author, Sasha Geffen, claims David Bowie developed his overtly androgynous look in consultation with the gay and trans artists in Andy Warhol's circle, especially trans punk musician Jayne County. County also says that Bowie peppered his work with uncredited bits of her original lyrics and music, which. Damnit, Bowie. But Geffen also baldly reminds us that County's work could never have blown up on her own merits: "the industry settled on a man who could do the best impression of a trans person while staying tethered to relative normalcy" (Geffen 33). 

I do think you can hear the connection, though, between County's mostly underground performances and Bowie's international superstar persona. Here's Jayne County and the Electric Chairs performing in the late 1970s-early 1980s in NYC:

And here's a short bio of Jayne County created by one of my favorite YouTubers:

I'm going to skip past all the punk, goth, synthopop, disco stuff (except to brag to you that I now know the origin of the term "house music"), because I'm too revved up about this chance to once again gush about Kurt Cobain and think about how sad I am that he died. In college, I met someone from Aberdeen, Washington, and was all, "DID YOU KNOW KURT COBAIN?!?" and she was all, "Sigh, everyone I meet asks me that. No."

If I still had all my grunge-look plaid flannel shirts, I could pass them off to Syd now, because apparently they're cool again. Hopefully they've always been cool, ahem, because all I've done over the past thirty years is occasionally upsize my own plaid flannel shirts.

Nirvana's music video for "In Bloom" actually works well in conversation with those glam rock Top of the Pops performances:

Cobain and Courtney Love did a lot of the emotional labor of defying the constraint of the culturally-imposed gender binary, and that had a lot to do with how cool I thought they were, and how much I loved their music, and how I felt at the time about his suicide. I sort of wonder now if the weight of that emotional labor didn't have something to do with his mental health struggles, and if he wouldn't have done better if he could have been plopped here thirty years into the future, where he could just create art and enjoy much of the fruits of that labor.

But then where would we be now if today's 40-somethings hadn't had him and Love as their teenaged role models?

As if that isn't sad enough, the epilogue to Glitter Up the Dark starts with a tribute to SOPHIE, how awesome her recent concert was, and how fucking epic her latest album is. Geffen expresses a desire to share in SOPHIE's "impossible optimism," and the book ends with that hope. 

Damnit, Geffen. I understand that you obviously didn't know that SOPHIE's life would also be tragically short, but still. You made me sad in front of an entire class of bored Health Science students that I was subbing for; one kid literally asked me, "Um, Miss, are you okay?" and when I lied and told her that I was allergic to something in the room, she was all, "Yeah, it smells in here. Can I have a hall pass?"

This is my favorite song and video by SOPHIE:

You're definitely not playing it loud enough to get the correct effect, but that just lets you appreciate the gymnastic choreography. 

Here's a Spotify playlist for Glitter Up the Dark:

It doesn't have all the songs and artists referenced in the book, but it probably has all the ones that are easily findable and on Spotify, so, you know, the musicians can earn themselves a whole penny every time their song gets a million or so plays. I'd definitely support artists better if I knew how (AND if it was as easy as using Spotify and YouTube, which is how I listen to all my music these days. I also use Chrome for browsing, which yesterday literally reduced Will to furious tears, she hates my lack of online best practices so much). 

DIY Borax Crystal Ornaments

 

This is such a fun and easy project that sneaks a bit of STEM into holiday crafting.

A few days ago, Will and I were in the mood to do a quick Christmas craft. We'd just cleaned the house for guests, so I didn't want to drag out a ton of crafting supplies, and we were already busy, so I didn't want to start something time-consuming and fussy.

Our solution: borax crystal ornaments!

The hands-on time commitment for these ornaments is just a few minutes, although be aware that the crystals will need to be left alone to grow for several hours, and preferably overnight. However, if you've got a countertop or table that doesn't get bumped every five minutes like my countertops and tables do, ahem, you can start this project in the morning and then check back in on it throughout the day to marvel at your crystal's growth!

To make your own lovely borax crystal ornaments, you will need:

• borax. I use this sometimes as a laundry booster, so I have it on hand with my cleaning supplies. If you don't already own it, research its cleaning properties and you might find that you'll be happy to have it on hand, too!
• pipe cleaners. I also have these on hand, although now that the kids are not so much kids anymore (sob), I suppose the time is coming that I'll have used up my last pipe cleaner and will have no need to buy more. Okay, that just got real sad...
• popsicle stick and thread. You don't need to use these specific materials, just something that you can tie to the pipe cleaner and something that you can rest on top of the container. 
• container. To avoid having to rinse a crust of borax crystals out of a jar, I cut the top off of some of the one-liter flavored sparkling waters that Syd and I are unfortunately obsessed with. Such wasteful packaging! Such delicious water!
• water and spoon.
• measuring cups. You'll need one-cup and a quarter-cup measuring cups.

And here's how to make your borax crystal ornaments!

1. Bend a pipe cleaner into a fun ornament shape. It needs to be small enough that it won't touch the sides or bottom of the container that will hold it, but otherwise you can create any shape that you like. The liter bottles that Will and I used were on the narrow side of the spectrum, so after some trial and error Will eventually hit on a spiral design that fit perfectly with plenty of room to spare AND looks utterly magical when crystalized!

You can crystalize two or three ornaments at once with the borax solution we use, and with Will's design we were able to do two spirals per container.

When you've got a design that you like, tie your thread to it, leaving plenty of length to wrap around the popsicle stick later.

2. Put water to boil, and while you're waiting, measure out 1/4 cup of borax and pour it into the bottom of the container you'll be using to grow your borax crystal ornaments.

When the water boils, measure out two cups and pour it into the container, then stir the borax well to create a saturated solution. The boiling water shrunk our plastic bottles a bit, but fortunately they remained usable.

3. When the solution is still, drop the ornament into the container and adjust the depth at which it sits by wrapping the string around the popsicle stick. The ornament shouldn't touch the sides or bottom of the container, and should be fully submerged. You can pour more hot water into the container to submerge the ornament, if needed, because this solution already has WAY more borax than required.

And don't forget that if there's room in your container, you can crystallize multiple ornaments at once!

4. Leave the ornaments alone to crystallize. Over the course of a few hours, they'll go from looking like this--

--to looking like this:

5. After about 24 hours-ish, remove the ornaments and let them air dry on a clean towel.

When they're completely dry, knot the string into a loop and hang them on the tree!

I don't know if these ornaments will last from year to year, but I do plan to store them and see. They're definitely much sturdier than the washing soda crystals that Will and I also tried; those didn't cover the pipe cleaner very well, and they started getting crumbly just a few days later:

Washing soda crystals look interesting through a microscope, but they don't make good ornaments.

If you want to turn this into a whole homeschool unit study (here's the very fun crystals unit study we did a few years ago!), here are some ideas:

• Make those washing soda crystals, and whatever other easy crystal recipes you can find. Compare and contrast!
• Try crystallizing objects other than pipe cleaners. Will and I did this, and we found that shells worked okay and wood worked less okay and was a pain in the butt to make sink. Give a kid enough containers, and I'm sure they could have all kinds of fun scrounging around the house and yard for objects to try!
• Look at the finished crystals through a microscope. My kids LOVED this kid-friendly USB microscope when they were younger. 
• Model crystal shapes. These models are more challenging (click on the broken image to be taken to the pdf model), while these are simpler. Copy them onto pretty cardstock, or draw your own decorations, and they'd also make lovely ornaments!
• Read about crystals. These are some of the books about crystals that my kids enjoyed when they were younger:

If you need to sneak in a media component to get your kids interested, Frozen and The Dark Crystal have fun crystal references, although The Dark Crystal will also scare the snot out of your younger kids.