Download Literary Analysis and Composition 2014-2015

Literary Analysis and
Composition 2014-2015
Monday, March 9
Composition 5.1
Composition 5.1
• What are our lesson objectives?
• What will I be able to do by the end of this lesson?
• I will be able to:
• Respond to a research paper.
• Identify and use the steps in the writing process:
prewriting, writing, and revising.
• Make a list of questions about a research topic.
• Choose and narrow a topic for a research paper.
• Brainstorm topics for a research paper.
Keywords and Pronunciation
• citation : a note stating where the author found a specific
piece of information
• fact : a statement that can be proven true
• opinion : a statement of belief that cannot be proven
true; the opposite of a fact
• purpose : the reason for writing
• research : finding information through study rather than
through personal experience
• source : a provider of information, such as a book, a
historical document, online materials, or an interviewee
• style : the words the writer chooses and the way the writer
arranges the words into sentences
• unity : a trait of writing achieved when all sentences in a
paragraph or all paragraphs in an essay support the main
idea
• voice : the way a piece of writing sounds
What is a research paper?
• The research paper unit is usually the longest and most
labor-intensive unit in a year of composition writing. Extra
time is needed not only for learning and practicing research
skills, but also for learning to cite sources, create a Works
Cited page, and construct a formal outline.
• A classic question asked by students when they begin a
research paper is, "How long should it be?" The answer will
vary with the nature of a specific topic, of course. As
students advance to higher levels, research papers will tend
to become progressively longer. For the assignment in this
unit, a reasonable length is four to six doublespaced pages,
or approximately 1,200 to 1,800 words.
• In this lesson's first activity, students will read a sample
research paper on a topic related to world history studies:
the Great Pyramid of Giza, built in ancient Egypt about
2550 B.C. They will answer questions about the paper,
focusing on the distinctive aspects of the research paper
genre. The three subsequent activities in this lesson will
guide them to choose and refine a topic for their own
research paper.
The Great Pyramid: Who Built it
and How, by Daniel Copland
•
Of all the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one still
stands today: the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza in Egypt.
Surprisingly, it is by far the oldest of the Seven Wonders. It was
already more than 2,000 years old in the time of the ancient
Greeks. For more than 4,000 years, the 481-foot-high pyramid was
the tallest structure ever built by humans. It is about as tall as a
fifty-story building. No other building reached that height until the
Eiffel Tower was created in 1887 (Putnam 20). The pyramid’s
square base, 756 feet long on each side, is 13 acres, or the size of
seven city blocks. The five biggest cathedrals of Europe could be all
fitted into the pyramid at the same time (The Pyramids).
•
How did this awe-inspiring structure come to be? Why was it built
and how, and who built it? Some writers have called the pyramids
mysterious, but recent archaeologists have found many answers to
these questions. When one knows how and why the pyramids were
built, the Egyptians' achievement seems even more impressive.
•
The pyramids were the tombs of ancient Egyptian kings, or
pharaohs. The pharaohs wanted to make sure that after their
death, they would rise to the heavens and be worshipped as gods.
According to Dr. Zahi Hawass, the director of archaeology at Giza,
building a pyramid was a way "to help the king become a god."
•
The pyramid shape may have originated from prehistoric Egyptian
burial mounds, which were made of heaped-up earth. The shape
had a religious meaning, for the ancient Egyptians believed that
the Earth had been formed as a mound rising up out of a vast sea.
"The pyramid was essentially this mound of creation," says the
official Egyptian website about the pyramids. The pyramid was a
"cocoon" (The Pyramids) in which the mummified king turned into
a spirit that rose into the sky to live with the gods. Because of the
pyramid's pointed shape, the building itself acted as a kind of ramp
to help the king on his journey (Scarre 22).
•
However, in addition to the religious meaning, there were also
practical reasons for why the ancient Egyptians chose the
pyramid’s shape. The pyramid is a strong, stable shape because it
has a wide base and narrow top. It is much harder to knock down
than a vertical building, which is why ancient pyramids still stand
today. In addition, the tomb's sheer size, and the cost and difficulty
of building it, made clear to the whole world that the pharaoh was
a very powerful man. Indeed, Khufu, who built the Great Pyramid,
has been called "probably the most powerful pharaoh ever to rule
Egypt" (Putnam 18).
•
By the time of Khufu's reign, about 2551–2528 B.C., the Egyptians
had been building pyramids for only about a century. They had
gotten better and better at the construction. While their earlier
monuments had been made of mud brick, in about 2680 B.C., the
Egyptians discovered how to build with large limestone blocks.
Soon after they mastered building with stone blocks, the Egyptians
changed their technique.
•
They switched from building step pyramids, which had a series
of smaller and smaller levels rising to the top, to the true
pyramid shape, which is smooth. Although today the Great
Pyramid has a staircase-like appearance, that is because the
outer layer of limestone has been torn away over the centuries.
When it was built, it would have looked smooth (Putnam 21). In
ancient times, the pyramid had a white limestone face. It
looked dazzling in the North African sunlight. At the very top,
according to some experts, was a cap made out of an alloy of
gold and silver (Curlee 6).
•
Khufu chose the site in Giza for his tomb because it had symbolic
and physical advantages. It was on the limestone plateau of Giza
on the west side of the Nile River. Symbolically, the Egyptians
associated the west with death, since the sun sets in the west.
Therefore, pharaohs' tombs were placed on that bank of the Nile.
•
From a practical standpoint, the Giza plateau had a firm limestone
base that could support a big, heavy building. The plateau was also
a source of vast amounts of building stone, so it wouldn’t have to be
carried far. Moreover, the site was just outside the area that the
Nile River flooded every summer.
•
(The flooding was to grow crops in that part of the world, but it
created one season each year when farm work had to pause.) The
pyramid’s location was so perfect that the two pharaohs
immediately following Khufu—Khafra and Menkaura—built their
own tombs close by, in line with his.
•
Before construction even began, there was a ten-year period of
planning and preparation (Curlee 4). Architects and engineers, who
were members of the royal court, worked out the geometry of the
pyramid on expensive papyrus, a form of ancient paper. They made
rough sketches on cheaper stone and built small models of the
pyramid. These models were divided into a grid pattern so that
each part could be rebuilt accurately on a large scale (Putnam 30,
32). The Egyptian unit of measurement was the cubit, which equals
20.62 inches. The cubit represented the distance from elbow to
thumb tip.
•
After the planning came a twenty-year period of building
(Curlee 4). The first task of the builders was to lay out the site.
The square area of land was precisely aligned with the four
directions. Since ancient Egyptians did not have compasses,
they used the stars to guide them, just as if they were
navigating a ship. A flat foundation for the pyramid was
created by digging a trench and filling it with water, since
water always settles to a flat level. Building blocks were placed
in the trench, and the tops of the blocks were planed smooth at
the water line (Putnam 30).
•
Stone blocks were cut at a nearby quarry. They were moved to the
building site and then lifted into place on the pyramid. At the site,
the blocks were smoothed into shape and fitted together. An
estimated 6,000,000–7,000,000 tons of limestone and granite went
into the Great Pyramid, or about 2,300,000 separate blocks
weighing an average of more than 2.5 tons apiece. The heavier
granite blocks, which were used to seal the royal burial chamber,
weighed more than 40 tons (Morell 82).
•
How were such huge blocks moved? Recent discoveries show that
sleds moved the blocks. A crew of at least 30 workers pulled each
sled (Putnam 36). Archaeologists have found remains of ancient
wooden sleds, and they have also found wall paintings of crews
using them (Putnam 28, 37, 46). The sleds were pulled up the side
of the pyramid on a temporary ramp made of sun-dried brick. The
ramp was inclined at an angle of about seven degrees (Stocks).
•
This angle was steep enough to lift the stone, but not so steep that
the sled would slide back. As the sled moved forward, workers in
front lubricated the ramp with water. This created a muddy
surface on which the sled could glide. The ramp was wide enough
for two-way traffic, with loaded sleds going up one side and empty
sleds going down the other (Putnam 36). Some experts say that the
ramp went around the pyramid (“Pyramids”). Others claim that a
ramp going straight up the side of the pyramid would have been
more usable. However, there may have been several types of ramp
for several purposes and for different levels of the structure(Scarre
25).
•
Whichever shape ramp was used, the Egyptian workers toiled
extremely hard. A stone was fitted into place every two minutes for
more than twenty years—"a phenomenal pace," according to Dr.
Hawass (Morell 89). After being lifted into position by levers, each
block was cut into its final, smooth shape. This was done so
skillfully that it is "often impossible to fit a knife-blade between"
one block and its neighbor (Scarre 25). The Egyptians used a
variety of simple tools to cut and shape the stone, including levers,
mallets, axes, adzes, polishers, saws, knives, and chisels. Workers
used copper tools to cut limestone, which is a relatively soft rock,
but they used stone tools to cut the harder granite. To work on
walls, workers used scaffolds made of poles and plant rope.
•
Researchers learned about these methods from ancient pictures
and from remains of tools. Some of the tools were found buried
with workers, so that the workers would be able to continue
their jobs in the afterlife (Putnam 34). The task of building the
pyramid obviously required a huge work force. Experts today
estimate that 20,000–30,000 laborers worked on the pyramid at
any one time. People used to believe that slaves built the
pyramids, but this is not true. Instead the workers were mostly
farmers who worked at the pyramid during the three summer
months when their fields were flooded. In addition, about 4,000
year-round workers, mostly skilled craftsmen, made up the rest
of the work force (Putnam 46).
•
Managing such a huge work force was a challenging task. "What
really blossomed in the 4th Dynasty," claims archaeologist James
Allen, "…wasn't the discovery of how to work large blocks of stone;
it was the discovery of how to organize a large labor force" (Morell
95). If they couldn’t manage all those people, the Egyptians would
have used their technique of stone cutting to build smaller works.
•
Researchers learned about the pyramid builders in 1990. In that
year Dr. Hawass unearthed a workers' cemetery near the Great
Pyramid. Since then, other archaeologists have dug up parts of a
workers' city, set out on a grid pattern. The city included a
production center for slaughtering livestock for food and for
making equipment (Morell 81, 85, 90–91).
• The workers' city housed 36,000 people (Mann 36). These
people included workers' families and workers who helped
• feed, clothe, and maintain the construction laborers:
butchers, bakers, brewers, priests, and even doctors with
their own clinic. At this clinic, doctors fixed broken limbs,
offered plant medicines, and, in one known case, performed
brain surgery (Hawass).
•
This information tells us that the work force was highly
specialized. It was divided into groups that had specific tasks:
raising a wall, building the roof of a burial chamber, and so on.
Large work crews were divided into smaller ones called phyles,
which in turn were divided into teams of 10 to 20 (Morell 88–89).
•
Each work group had its own name, and one group would compete
against others to do the best, fastest work. Archaeologists have
found that the teams sometimes wrote their names, such as
"Friends of Khufu," in red in areas of the pyramid that they built.
•
Although most of the work force were ordinary laborers, there were
also many levels of supervisors. Foremen oversaw the construction.
Scribes recorded the daily progress of the work, even writing down
the excuses of workers who fell ill (Putnam 31). In the workers'
cemetery, tombs have been found that record titles such as
overseer of the rowers, overseer of the side of the pyramid, master
of the harbor, master of the king's bakeries, chief of the sculptors,
and master of the craftsmen (Morell 95–96).
•
Being a supervisor had advantages over being a laborer. The
average pyramid laborer died at age 30–35 (Hawass ). Skeletons at
the worker's cemetery, both male and female, show that most of the
people there had arthritis from years of carrying heavy loads
(Morell 97). In contrast, the supervisors at the site lived to an
average age of 50–60 (Hawass).
•
Under such conditions, did building the pyramids help the
Egyptian people? The ancient Greeks thought that building the
pyramids was a wasteful luxury of the pharaohs (Donovan). Many
historians have guessed that the cost of building the pyramids, and
the focus of so much time and energy on tombs, harmed Egypt's
economy and its society.
•
However, some recent writers believe that the people who built the
pyramids did it willingly, because they worshipped their pharaoh
•
and wanted to help him achieve immortality. "They were proud of
their work,“ says Dr. Hawass. "…they were not just building the
tomb of their king. They were building Egypt. It was a national
project, and everyone was a participant" (Morell 82–83). When the
pyramid was completed, a great celebration occurred, with a
million people feasting, dancing, and singing in honor of their king
and of what he had made them do. Today, we still honor their
work. We visit the pyramids, read about them, and write articles
about them. Few other achievements in human history have lasted
so long or inspired so much wonder.
What does the Works Cited page
look like?