The tablets

Some time before the creation of the Psalm 119 scroll, I had always wanted to know how clay tablets with inscriptions on them would look, feel, and sound. Being extremely interested in Ancient Near Eastern history, I was fascinated by clay tablets and how whole civilizations based their economy on them. In fact, the origin of writing can be traced back to clay tablets. For the Wikipedia article that gives you an overview, click here.

So, I decided to go for it. Since I love Paleo-Hebrew (could you tell?) I thought I'd write the 1st chapter of Genesis on clay tablets, using my favorite script - the Tel Dan stele script. Now there is absolutely no evidence that the Israelites ever used clay tablets for writing, but I thought it was cool so I went ahead and did it anyway.

The preparation process was painstaking. I had to translate the Masoretic Hebrew script (see my previous post, Paleo-Hebrew comparison) into Paleo-Hebrew letter by letter. I had a digital version of the Hebrew Old Testament on one side of the screen, and my word processor on the other side, typing what I saw and interpreting each alef, bet, gimmel, etc. into Roman alphabetic keystrokes, which in turn showed up in Paleo-Hebrew script on my word processor. Makes me tired remembering that. Come to think of it, that's what I had to do with my Psalm 119 scroll, too.

Once I had the Paleo-Hebrew transcription printed out on sheets of paper, it was time to make the tablets. I took some Prang self-hardening clay and sliced it with a knife into four tablets (at the time, I didn't know it was going to be four). I then massaged the slice of clay with my hands until I got a good tablet.

I then used a mechanical pencil to carefully incise the surface of the tablet with the Hebrew characters. At first, I wasn't sure it would work, as a test with some regular clay proved to be disastrous. I then realized that it depended on the wetness of the clay. If it was too wet, the clay was too easy to penetrate with the thin tool I was using. This would result in a line that was too thin and could be easy to erase by accident. If it was too dry, the clay would clump up and be virtually impossible to write on.

So I used a careful application of spray bottle, keeping the surface just moist enough to allow a perfect incision that, if done correctly, would cause the surrounding clay to follow the pencil downwards slightly. Needless to say, from the photos below it is easy to see that this was not achieved every time. Take this close-up, for instance:

This was my first tablet and there so are many signs of amateur craftsmanship that I cringe to look at it today. Some of the places where the letter curves were particularly difficult, so I was forced to employ a sort of pointillism in achieving the flowing lines. You can see the evidence of this if you look closely. Later on in the project, I learned how to avoid this, resulting in a better-looking body of text:

The clustering of the text toward the bottom of Tablet 3 looks cool, but was really a result of poor planning. I was trying to avoid ending a tablet in the middle of a verse, and as a result I ended up cramming dozens of characters into a tiny spot.

It felt good to finish the project. When they were dried, I now had four clay tablets that made a satisfying clinking sound when they rub together, similar to what the ancients heard thousands of years ago.

  All four tablets together

 Another close-up

The finished product

Finally, after a few months, I had my first full scroll, complete with all 22 stanzas of Psalm 119 and handles with finials.

Not sure why I took this picture with a bowl of fruit, but I guess it looks kind of awesome.

This concludes my first full scroll. I will be creating other projects in the future. In fact, I had done 3 projects prior to this and I will be posting those soon.

On to the Finials!

No scroll is complete without finials. The finials are the little handle things on either side of the scroll, that always look so cool in movies when they unfurl it.

To make them, I took four wooden discs, four wooden candle holders, and four wooden spheres. I glued them together and stained them with a dark wood stain.

After they had been allowed to set for a while, I wiped the finials dry with a paper towel and left the core stain still on the wood. I did this a couple of times.

Next - the finished product!

Paleo-Hebrew comparison

How does Paleo-Hebrew compare to more "modern" Hebrew? That is, the Hebrew script I employed in this scroll doesn't look anything like you may have seen here and there.

Here's a comparison chart:

Hebrew alphabets

The big scroll project I was doing back in 2009 involved a script of Hebrew that is not the one that is in use today by Biblical scholars or the Israeli nation.

It is called Paleo-Hebrew and it was employed from around 1200-500 B.C. It underwent a lot of changes during that time, but any script that is strictly Hebrew in that span would be considered Paleo-Hebrew.

It is said to be evolved from Phoenecian, which in turn evolved from Ugaritic. The origins of Ugaritic are clearly Mesopotamian. However, a text in the Sinai peninsula contained a proto-Canaanite script, which could indicate a different story.

Whatever the case, I find the Paleo-Hebrew script beautiful and love working with it. To the right you can see the Tel-Dan stele's inscription. It is purported to contain the earliest (and only) extra-biblical reference to the "house of David" (bet David).

How about Paleo-Hebrew on papyrus? Unfortunately, we do not have many examples. The best renderings of Paleo-Hebrew are found on stone. There are a few extant texts on papyrus, the most notable being the inclusion of the tetragrammaton (YHWH, the holy name of God) in Masoretic Hebrew texts and even Greek.

Despite the scanty evidence, however, I decided to move forward with my papyrus scroll written in Paleo-Hebrew, confident that some ancient scribe must have written on sheets of papyrus in this fantastic script in days gone by.

First Full Scroll

I created this scroll back in 2009. I used a bamboo pen with India ink on papyrus. However, I believe this style of papyrus not to be papyrus at all, but rather banana leaves, due to some research on Youtube. It appears that papyrus that is translucent (that is, the papyrus that "looks" like papyrus to most partakers of popular culture) is actually banana leaves. For authentic papyrus, you must look for the darker, opaque sheets.

The image at left shows the first 3 stanzas of the scroll. The text was taken from 119th Psalm of the Bible. Since this Psalm was most likely not written by David, unlike many other Psalms, I used a script of Paleo-Hebrew that would align with the period of the Divided Kingdom of Israel. I chose the script from the Tel Dan Stele.

Psalm 119 is an acrostic Psalm - that is, each verse of any particular stanza will begin with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Since Hebrew reads from right to left, you would look at the right-most character to see this effect. As you can see, the first letters - aleph, bet, and gimel - begin the first three stanzas. You can also see the beginning of the next three: dalet, he, and vav.

 Close-up of the text

The bamboo pen at work