Sumerian Writing Seals and a Ziggurat Cake

Last week we learned about Ancient Mesopotamia, and the civilizations that flourished there. One such civilization were the Sumerians. After learning about them we decided to make our own writing seals such as Sumerian scribes used long ago. We made them out of sculpey clay because it is bakeable and therefore becomes very hard. We wanted the best possible chance that our seals would make good impressions later.

Everyone started with a wax paper work surface, and two little piles of clay.


If you have never worked with sculpey clay, it takes quite a bit of kneading to make it soft and pliable. We had to stand up and really lean into it. Little Man (age 5) needed a bit of help, but not much. If you were doing this with children younger than 5 you would probably want to knead the clay ahead of time to reduce frustration. We all used the red clay to make cylinders, and the black clay to make designs to put around the cylinders.


We used a variety of tools for making our designs. Some small cookie cutters, shapes and letters made out of a clay "rope", and even forks and knives for cutting and shaping our own designs.


Our daughter, ever the ar-tist, chose to knead both colors together to get a marbled look. This would not make a difference in the impressions to be made later, but would look nice to the person using the seal!


Some of the children used a toothpick to poke small holes in their designs once they had put them on the cylinder.


Our daughter chose to put her name on her seal, so she rolled out a long clay rope and then cut it in pieces to form each letter of her name. It was tricky to figure out how to put the letters on the cylinders so that when it was rolled out later the name wouldn't be backwards, but she did it!


Here are all five cylinders ready to be baked. This picture may be too small for you to tell, but I found it really interesting how different each cylinder/seal was! Proof positive that each child is very unique!! It is very important to bake sculpey clay on top of foil. Do not set the clay directly in the pan. Set your oven for 275 degrees, and then bake for 15 minutes per 1/4" thickness. I ended up baking our seals for about 45-50 minutes, and then turning off the oven but leaving the seals in until the oven was cool. You want them to be rock hard, but you *can* overbake them and then they're ruined, so you just need to check frequently (every 10-15 minutes).

When they were sufficiently cooled we rolled them across playdough to test them out. They worked GREAT!






A very fun project!!

Next we turned our attention to making a cake ziggurat. We had learned about Mesopotamian ziggurats and compared them to Egyptian pyramids. Someone shared with me the idea of making a ziggurat out of cake rather than just stacking and painting boxes, which was my original plan. Anytime we can eat our creations that is just super fun, plus it means nothing to store later. Bonus! So we mixed two white cakes mixes together.


We baked them in two pans, and used the smaller of the two for the base of our ziggurat. We cut the remaining, larger cake in two pieces but not exactly in half.



Then we started frosting and stacking.





Ta-da!! A yummy ziggurat to eat and enjoy with daddy.