Friday, September 28, 2007

Crack the Code Contest

This week, we read about the first writing of the Sumerians and the Egyptians. The children each read a book about the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone. For a fun Friday activity, Evan, Matthew and Sophie colored some paper to resemble papyrus, and using a very simplified hieroglyphics alphabet, they each wrote down a hieroglyphic message to decode. Scroll down, if you like, to look at their writing, and take a crack at decoding their messages! Also included below is a copy of the alphabet that they used. I will send a prize (see below) to the first person to contact me (see sidebar for contact info.) with all of the messages translated into complete English sentences. Please do not post the answers as a comment! Have fun!

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Click on the pictures to view larger.

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Clue: Hieroglyphics do not have spaces between the words or punctuation. Since there is no letter "C" in hieroglyphics, a "K" is used instead. The kids chose not to be too tricky and wrote from left to right, though hieroglyphics can even be written right to left or in vertical columns!

The Prize:
The winner may pick from one of the following books!


2 comments:

Dana a/k/a Sunshine said...

How fun was that? I just sent you an email with our guess.

Thanks for letting us play.

Dana and Brandon

Chris said...

My kids and I have been studying Anceient Egypt using TruthQuest. We are getting ready to move onto pyramids. I love the idea of making a 3D map. My kids drew map's and did a great job. Maybe we will make a 3D pyramid.