Dr. Leigh-Ann Bedal works with student Jack Norton who is drawing Chinese characters on rice paper.
Honors course reveals modern lessons in ancient scripts
As Dr. Leigh-Ann Bedal, associate professor of anthropology, handed each student a bamboo brush, she instructed them to hold it perpendicular to the rice paper. The characters they would write required this vertical precision, with each stroke flowing from shoulder and wrist rather than just fingertips. But when the students touched their ink-filled brushes to the paper, they instinctively pinched the bristles like a pencil, struggling to adjust. In minutes, the struggle became the lesson.
This kind of hands-on experience defines CAMS 109Y: Writing Systems of the World. The honors course begins with picture writing pressed into clay tablets by ancient Mesopotamian scribes and ends with a presentation on emojis and digital communication. Along the way, students discover something unexpected: a profound connection between themselves and the inventors of the world’s first writing systems.
“Most students have never given the Latin alphabet they read and write every day much thought,” said Bedal, who taught the course at Behrend this past spring. “They’ve never learned its origin or history, nor that an alphabet is only one kind of writing system.”
By the time students complete the course, which is offered every two to three years, they’ve physically inhabited the experiences of ancient scribes, working with the same materials and confronting the same challenges.
Learning by Doing
Bedal’s students don’t just study ancient writing—they recreate it. Students press wooden styli into clay, brush ink onto rice paper, and paint hieroglyphs on papyrus.
“I believe it is always more effective to learn by doing,” Bedal said.
There’s a deeper reason Bedal structures the course this way. Ancient cultures used materials from their natural environment when creating their scripts—clay in Mesopotamia, papyrus in Egypt, and rice paper in China—and those materials directly shaped how the scripts developed. Working with these materials gives students a tactile sense of the challenges ancient scribes faced.
A participant practices writing cuneiform on a clay tablet during a hands-on lesson in CAMS 109Y: Writing Systems of the World.
When students work with a clay tablet, they quickly discover that size, thickness, and hardness matter. A scribe holds the tablet firmly in one hand, which limits both its size and the amount of text it can contain. Drawing with a pointed stick creates ragged lines—something Mesopotamian scribes solved by pressing the stylus at an angle, forming small wedges that made up the script.
Ink on papyrus and rice paper reveals a striking contrast. These materials allow for fluid shapes and identifiable pictographs, demonstrating how the medium shapes the message in the most literal sense.
“Students better understand how ancient scribes needed to invent signs that were simple enough to compose documents in a timely manner, but distinct enough from each other to convey a variety of information,” Bedal said.
Old Skills, Modern Insights
The course starts with cave paintings, as an example of visual communication, and covers ten different scripts as well as number systems, before ending with modern digital communication and emojis, bringing visual communication full circle to the present day.
For many scripts, students learn to write their own names—something familiar that helps them compare vastly different systems. The assignment seems simple until they attempt it. Bedal has noticed a consistent challenge: Students try to write too small, making their signs illegible.
The course drew on expertise from across the college, including Dr. Qi Dunsworth, above, who taught the hands-on lesson on Chinese script. Having learned modern Chinese script as a child, Dunsworth, director of the Center for Pedagogical Advancement, shared techniques for proper brush handling and stroke order.
“It’s hard for some to approach learning a new script as a kindergartener does—big, clear, legible letters,” she said.
When students complete their first cuneiform tablet or hieroglyphic text, Bedal sees something she treasures—pride in their accomplishment. That pride emerges from recognizing a tangible connection with ancient peoples who faced the same challenge to communicate ideas clearly and effectively.
“By learning to write ancient scripts and confronting the challenges of making signs legible, students gain a new respect for the care, skill, and thought behind all writing systems— including their own—and come to appreciate modern writing and digital communication as part of a long, creative tradition of visual expression,” Bedal said.