![]() ![]() video on Mesopotamian scribes & making the basic wedge shapes, and see here for more tips, details & pictures. Get ready to practice your letter forms with Omniglot and. You may want to start with some internet browsing for inspiration. This is the time consuming part, and fair warning, it takes practice and patience. Now it's time to settle in and start writing. I recommend using a dough scraper or knife to make the lines instead, and skipping the tracing stage. However, while the pointed stylus might have worked for real clay tablets, in my experience it doesn't work well with sticky dough. The pointy end of the stylus could also be used to draw straight lines across some tablets as a guide for writing neatly, or to lightly trace out the text you plan to write so you can figure out the spacing beforehand and concentrate on making good wedge-shapes later. Later, the line-drawings of pictographs were stylized into the classic wedge-shaped cuneiform we all know and love. A pointy stylus was used to draw pictographs in the earliest clay tablets. You can do this with a pen-knife or, depending on the size of your chopstick, with a pencil sharpener. Optional: Make the other end into a point. SEE HERE for tremendous practical and historical details, and make sure to scroll down for loads of helpful pictures. Historically a stylus would have been made with a split reed. ![]() Then make another cut at a slight angle, so that the cross-section of your chopstick is a triangle with one slightly curved side. Using your pen-knife, shave the chopstick down so that it is flat on one side. You can make an excellent and serviceable stylus out of a disposable chopstick or a small dowel rod. The dough will soften up as you go, and it's much easier to work when the dough is chilled.īefore you can inscribe any cuneiform, you need a trusty stylus to write with. When it comes to inscribing them, take one or two tablets out of the fridge at a time to work on. ![]() I like to roll out and shape my "tablets" first, and then put them all back in the fridge. You can form all your tablets by hand, but it takes longer to do it that way. Any leftover dough can be molded into shape by hand, which actually gives you a more authentic look.I stamp out circles using the mouth of a drinking glass. Bigger is more like real tablets, smaller is better for cookies. For round tablets, aim for 2½ to 3 inches in diameter.Cut square and rectangles with a knife, a dough scraper, a pizza roller, or whatever else you have on hand for trimming dough. For rectangular tablets, aim for 2 x 2½ inches up to 2½ x 4 inches.This is a little thinner than actual tablets, but better for cookies. Roll out dough about ⅜ inch thick, or 1 cm.Make a variety of sizes, and don't worry if they're not perfect shapes - it will only make them look more realistic! Round tablets usually contain the school exercises of student scribes, with scribbled proverbs, math problems, or simply repeated words and letters. Rectangular tablets are usually receipts, inventories, tax documents, or personal letters. Real cuneiform tablets can be as small as a postage stamp or as big as a sheet of letterhead, but most are somewhere in between and actually reasonably cookie-sized. bamboo/wooden chopsticks, or a small dowel rod. ![]()
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